Making inquiry-based science learning visible: the influence of CVS and cognitive skills on content knowledge learning in guided inquiry

ABSTRACT

Many science curricula and standards emphasise that students should learn both scientific knowledge and the skills associated with the construction of this knowledge. One way to achieve this goal is to use inquiry-learning activities that embed the use of science process skills. We investigated the influence of scientific reasoning skills (i.e. conceptual and procedural knowledge of the control-of-variables strategy) on students’ conceptual learning gains in physics during an inquiry-learning activity. Eighth graders (n?=?189) answered research questions about variables that influence the force of electromagnets and the brightness of light bulbs by designing, running, and interpreting experiments. We measured knowledge of electricity and electromagnets, scientific reasoning skills, and cognitive skills (analogical reasoning and reading ability). Using structural equation modelling we found no direct effects of cognitive skills on students’ content knowledge learning gains; however, there were direct effects of scientific reasoning skills on content knowledge learning gains. Our results show that cognitive skills are not sufficient; students require specific scientific reasoning skills to learn science content from inquiry activities. Furthermore, our findings illustrate that what students learn during guided inquiry activities becomes visible when we examine both the skills used during inquiry learning and the process of knowledge construction. The implications of these findings for science teaching and research are discussed.     

Climate Change and Morality: Students' perspectives on the individual and society

There is a growing interest in addressing moral aspects in the research and education of socio‐scientific issues. This paper investigates students' interpretations of climate change from a moral perspective. The students were 14 years old, studying at Green Schools in the Beijing area, China. The study was based on semi‐structured group interviews and the data were analysed from an intentional perspective, which means that both cognitive and situational aspects were taken into consideration in the analysis. Previous research has revealed a close relation between morality and socio‐scientific issues and also advocated the need for addressing ethical aspects in science education. However, empirical studies exploring the question of what students' moral reasoning might look like at the individual level have not yet generated enough attention. In this study this is the core focus of interest. The findings show that the students conceptualise the solutions to mitigating climate change in relation to two different stances. That is, they contextualise the problems and solutions by addressing the individual, where the individual is either ‘myself’ or ‘someone else’. The different notions of the individual become crucial as the students' views and considerations for the environment, as well as society, change according to the different contexts. From a moral point of view, the students seem quite unaware of their varying consideration for others, the environment and society. The paper ends with a discussion of implications for practice and research.     

The ICEM International Media Week

Abstract

Each year ICEM holds an International Media Week, and this report gives details of the 1996 event.     

Contextualizing Teacher Autonomy in time and space: a model for comparing various forms of governing the teaching profession

This study aims to develop a model for comparing different forms of teacher autonomy in various national contexts and at different times. Understanding and explaining local differences and global similarities in the teaching profession in a globalized world require conceptions that contribute to further theorization of comparative and international education. Drawing on a governance perspective and building on considerations of curriculum evaluation, the study argues that teacher autonomy is a crucial factor that has to be conceptualized in its national and historical contexts. It presents an examination of the teaching profession from both an institutional and service perspective. In both perspectives, teacher autonomy, framed by curriculum evaluation, can be regarded as both extended and restricted, but not necessarily at the same time. This point of view enables us to discuss different forms of autonomy in relation to each other. To support this idea, the study discusses cases of teachers in various contexts of time and space.     

Scientific Reasoning,School Achievement and Gender: a Multilevel Study of between and within School Effects in Finland

The relationships between reasoning and school achievement were studied taking into account the multilevel nature (school- and class-levels) of the data. We gathered data from 51 classes at seven schools in metropolitan and Eastern Finland (N = 769, 395 males, 15-year-old students). To study scientific reasoning, we used a modified version of Science Reasoning Tasks, tapping control-of-variable schemata. Analyses were conducted by MLwiN2.10 multilevel modelling. The present results showed that the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) of schools for scientific reasoning is 7% and that the corresponding ICC of classes is 10%. Whereas the first finding confirms earlier PISA results, the second finding provides new insights into class variation within schools. In practice, class composition seems to be an efficient solution to meeting the differing needs of individual students.     

Co-Producing Children's Sociality in Parent–Teacher Conferences

The aim of this article is to describe how parents and preschool teachers talk about children's interactional skills in parent–teacher conferences in the Swedish preschool and how this can be related to socialization processes. The analyses show that children's communicative skills, such as turn-taking in conversation and co-operation, are considered as important for both parents and teachers and talked about in terms of trouble or success. Children's skills are often assessed by using chronological age as a parameter. Our analysis suggests that the talk about children's interactional skills may be interpreted in terms of deficiency discourses founded primarily on theories in developmental psychology, and that parents, and particularly the teachers, present themselves as socializing agents with regard to children.     

Pressures,rewards and teacher retention: a comparative study of primary teaching in England and Finland

The article presents some findings from the York‐Jyväskylä Teacher Professionalism project. The project was a follow‐up study to earlier case‐study research in six schools in Finland and six schools in England on the impact of educational reforms on teachers' work. Data were collected by re‐interviewing a sample of teachers from the original schools six years later. The views of English and Finnish teachers concerning the ways in which changes in practice, pay and working conditions affected their perception of teaching as a profession are contrasted. The crucial factors discouraging teachers from remaining in teaching were work intensification, low pay, deteriorating pupil behaviour and a decline in public respect. Positive influences on teacher retention were commitment to children, professional freedom and supportive colleagues. Suggestions are offered as to how policy makers should act to preserve the commitment of primary teachers and to promote their retention.     

Educational Psychology: some thoughts on the transformation of learning in social practices and its consequences for a field of research

The relevance of psychological knowledge to education and learning has been recognized for long time. Educational psychology was thus, one of the first subdisciplines of applied psychology to emerge on the academic scene, and most scholars in the area — internationally as well as in the Nordic countries — have had a firm grounding in psychology. For a couple of decades or more during the second half of this century, educational psychology held a central position within education in most of the Nordic countries. Research within this field has been varied and vigorous. However, although psychological theories should be seen as important intellectual resources, it must be recognized that the relationship between a general discipline such as psychology and a particular area such as education is complex. Important problematics inherent in this relationship are illuminated and discussed in the contribution by Säljö on Sweden. It is argued, that recent attempts to develop a cultural psychology, explicitly recognizing the socio‐cultural nature of learning and other psychological processes, promise to pave the way for conceptions of human activities that are relevant to human concerns in general. The second article in this section, on Finland, contrasts with the first by focusing on educational research performed during the last few decades. This article describes trends in the content and methodologies of this research. The developmental orientation has been very strong in Finnish educational psychology during the whole of the post‐war period. Early research was highly influenced by a differential‐psychology approach, whereas later research has adopted social, motivational and cognitive frameworks. This article discuss the influential theoretical trends and developments.