Measuring Science Teachers’ Stress Level Triggered by Multiple Stressful Conditions

The complexity of science teaching requires science teachers to encounter a range of tasks. Some tasks are perceived as stressful while others are not. This study aims to investigate the extent to which different teaching situations lead to different stress levels. It also aims to identify the easiest and most difficult conditions to be regarded as stressful conditions by science teachers. An occupational stress inventory of 25 items developed by Okebukola (1988) validation of the occupational stress inventory for science teachers. Science Teacher, was used to measure the science teachers’ stress level in science teaching. A four point Likert scale ranging from 1 – ‘no stress at all’ to 4 – ‘extreme stress’ was used. Fifty-eight Malaysian secondary science teachers participated in the survey in which six volunteered to participate in the interview study. The data was then analyzed using the Rasch model to measure the level of stress caused by different kinds of stressful conditions. Even though ‘overloaded science syllabus’ was identified to be the basis of multiple stressful conditions, it was, however, difficult for the respondents to regard it as a stressful condition. On the other hand, the respondents found that ‘having to teach difficult science topics’ is easiest to be regarded as a stressful condition. It was shown that even though ‘overloaded science syllabus’ is the starting point for stress caused by multiple conditions, due to the availability of coping strategies which can be employed by the respondents, the stressor is minor in causing stress among teachers. On the other hand, when teachers lack the availability of coping strategies dealing with teaching difficult science topics, they easily feel stressful. One of the main recommendations to overcome stressful conditions is to provide the science teachers ‘topic specific pedagogy’ during in-service training.     

Developing inclusive practices through collaborative action research

This paper highlights the framework and discusses the results of an action research network which aimed to promote academic access in two general educational settings within which a pupil with blindness and a deaf pupil were educated respectively. The persons involved in this collaborative scheme were general teachers, a school counsellor, academic staff and student teachers. The findings of the study indicate that the implementation of the action research network resulted in the development of inclusive and collaborative thinking and the adoption of relevant teaching practices which promoted the children's access to the curriculum and supported the teachers' and student teachers' professional development. The outcomes of this action research network raise concerns about the access and the status of membership of children with special needs in general educational classroom and provide insights for the pivotal role of action research in understanding educational contexts and situations from a number of different perspectives.     

A Multidimensional Scaling Analysis of Students’ Attitudes about Science Careers

To encourage students to seek careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields, it is important to gauge students’ implicit and explicit attitudes towards scientific professions. We asked high school and college students to rate the similarity of pairs of occupations, and then used multidimensional scaling (MDS) to create a spatial representation of occupational similarity. Other students confirmed the emergent MDS map by rating each of the occupations along several dimensions. We found that participants across age and sex considered scientific professions to be less creative and less people‐oriented than other popular career choices. We conclude that students may be led away from STEM careers by common misperceptions that science is a difficult, uncreative, and socially isolating pursuit.     

Public university entry in Ghana: Is it equitable?

Public universities in Ghana are highly subsidised by the central government and account for about 80 per cent of university students in the country. Yet issues of fairness in terms of entry into the public university system have so far hardly been addressed. To find out whether participation in public university education is equitable, the authors of this paper carried out a binary logistic regression analysis. Individual data were collected from 1,129 (614 male and 515 female) final year senior high school (SHS) students for the 2009 cohort. The authors measured student, father and mother characteristics likely to influence admission to a public university. The results show that the major predictors of public university entry are students’ academic ability, quality of SHS attended and number of siblings. This seems to suggest that there is a significant bias in the selection of students from different socio-economic groups for admission to highly subsidised public universities. The implication is that public financing of university education in Ghana may not be equitable.     

PRESERVICE TEACHERS’ VIEWS ABOUT NATURE OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE DEVELOPMENT: AN INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATIVE STUDY

This article presents the findings of an international collaborative investigation into preservice teachers’ views on the nature of scientific knowledge development with respect to six elements: observations and inferences, tentativeness, scientific theories and laws, social and cultural embeddedness, creativity and imagination, and scientific methods. A total of 640 preservice teachers, 209 from the United States, 212 from China, and 219 from Turkey, participated in the study. The survey “Student Understanding of Science and Scientific Inquiry (SUSSI)”, having a blend of Likert-type items and related open-ended questions, was used to gain a fuller understanding of the preservice teachers’ views of the nature of scientific knowledge development. Across the three countries, the participants demonstrated better understanding of the tentative NOS aspect but less understanding of the nature of and relationship between scientific theories and scientific laws. The Chinese sample scored highest on five of the six Likert sub-scales, the USA sample demonstrated more informed views on observation and inference, and the Turkish preservice teachers possessed relatively more traditional views in all six NOS aspects. Conclusions and limitations of the present study as well as implications and recommendations for future studies, are also discussed.     

Correction to: High School Students' Reasons for Their Science Dispositions: Community-Based Innovative Technology-Embedded Environmental Research Projects

Research in Science Education - The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake. The name of “Dima Kassab” was incorrectly spelled as “Dimma Kasab”.     

Automated opinion detection: Implications of the level of agreement between human raters

The ability to agree with the TREC Blog06 opinion assessments was measured for seven human assessors and compared with the submitted results of the Blog06 participants. The assessors achieved a fair level of agreement between their assessments, although the range between the assessors was large. It is recommended that multiple assessors are used to assess opinion data, or a pre-test of assessors is completed to remove the most dissenting assessors from a pool of assessors prior to the assessment process. The possibility of inconsistent assessments in a corpus also raises concerns about training data for an automated opinion detection system (AODS), so a further recommendation is that AODS training data be assembled from a variety of sources. This paper establishes an aspirational value for an AODS by determining the level of agreement achievable by human assessors when assessing the existence of an opinion on a given topic. Knowing the level of agreement amongst humans is important because it sets an upper bound on the expected performance of AODS. While the AODSs surveyed achieved satisfactory results, none achieved a result close to the upper bound.     

The influence of instruction,prior knowledge,and values on climate change risk perception among undergraduates

We evaluated influences on the climate change risk perceptions of undergraduate students in an introductory Earth Science course. For this sample, domain‐specific content knowledge about climate change was a significant predictor of students' risk perception of climate change while cultural worldviews (individualism, hierarchy) and political orientation were not. These results contrast with previous studies highlighting worldviews as a dominant influence on risk perception. At the beginning of the semester, students' climate change content knowledge was relatively low, with average scores on a 21‐item test less than 50%. Post instruction results indicated that students learned climate change science during the course, and their perceptions of risks associated with climate change increased. Unlike most prior research evaluating links between climate change knowledge and risk perception, our measure of content knowledge was a validated assessment specific to climate change. Use of this specific climate knowledge test may be one reason that we detected a relationship between climate knowledge and risk perception whereas most of the previous research has not. Another—possibly complementary—explanation may be a generational shift between our study sample and prior samples. Undergraduates today, having grown up with more exposure to climate change in schools and the media than previous generations, may be diverging from average adults in that learning climate science appears to also increase their perceptions of the risks climate change poses. Undergraduate courses with embedded climate‐related activities present an opportunity to both increase climate science knowledge and risk perceptions of future decision makers.     

A cross‐cultural examination of typically developing children's attitudes toward individuals with special needs

This study explores children's attitudes toward individuals with special needs in Greece and in the United States. A total of 196 kindergarten‐age children participated in the study. Children's attitudes were examined using the Acceptance Scale for Kindergartners‐Revised (ASK‐R) and were further explored with the use of an open‐ended interview. In addition, the Inventory of Disability Representation (IDR) was used to collect information about how individuals with special needs are represented in school and classroom environments through books, displays, materials and curriculum. The results indicated that children in Greece and the United States were accepting of individuals with special needs. Also, children attending inclusive kindergartens held more positive attitudes when compared with children attending non‐inclusive kindergartens. Results from the interviews provided further information that contributes to the understanding of children's perceptions of people with special needs and the reasons why children become more or less favourably disposed towards individuals with special needs. Finally, IDR results indicated that the classrooms in Greece had low representations of individuals with special needs compared with US classrooms, which had moderate and high representations of individuals with disabilities in the classroom and school environments.     

Deaf and hearing individuals' beliefs about the capabilities of deaf people

The study explored the beliefs of 100 residents of Greece about the capabilities of deaf people living in that country. Participants included deaf adults who communicated in Greek Sign Language (GSL), deaf adults who communicated orally, hearing adults who attended GSL courses, and hearing adults who did not attend such courses. Beliefs were explored through the ODP (Opinions About Deaf People) scale (Berkay, Gardner, & Smith, 1995) and an open-ended interview. All participant groups viewed deaf people's capabilities positively, but Deaf users of GSL expressed the most positive beliefs. The findings suggest that less positive beliefs reflect diverse ideological views toward GSL and Deaf culture or an awareness of the obstacles preventing deaf people from developing their potential. The Deaf community's role in empowering deaf people and the role of GSL courses in promoting awareness regarding deaf people are also discussed.