Teaching Teachers About Energy: Lessons from an Inquiry-Based Workshop for K-8 Teachers

We report results and impressions from a three-day inquiry-based workshop for K-8 teachers, aimed at improving their understanding of energy from a science and engineering perspective. Results suggest that the teachers made significant gains in understanding and appreciation of important energy concepts, but their comprehension of some key ideas remained incomplete. The dissipation of energy into thermal energy of the environment proved to be a particularly difficult idea, and one that represents a serious obstacle to understanding the principle of the conservation of energy.     

The much exaggerated death of positivism

Approaches to research in the social sciences often embrace schema that are consistent with positivism, even though it is widely held that positivism is discredited and essentially dead. Accordingly, many of the methods used in present day scholarship are supported by the tenets of positivism, and are sources of hegemony. We exhort researchers to employ reflexive methods to identify the epistemologies, ontologies and axiologies that are salient in their scholarship and, when necessary, transform practices such that forms of oppression associated with crypto-positivism are identified and extinguished.

Impediments to change: Applications of coaching in high-school science teaching

This article describes how two coaching models were utilized in an attempt to assist Jonathon, an experienced teacher who had been teaching science for only two years, to improve his science teaching. Because of the numerous difficulties that Jonathon encountered in planning and implementing the science curriculum, school administrators requested assistance from several science educators from a university near the school. In order to assist Jonathon, two coaching models were used over a period of approximately six months. In the first coaching program two high-school teachers were coached by three science educators from the university. In the second coaching program the teachers coached one another. Neither program was successful in improving Jonathon's teaching in the intended manner. The major impediments to change were Jonathon's beliefs about teaching and learning and his relatively poor knowledge of the science content he was to teach. The findings of the study suggest that the coaching interventions require teachers to analyze teaching, reflect on practice, and consider alternative approaches to teaching and learning. Involvement in the coaching programs provided Jonathon with a foundation of knowledge on which sustained improvements in teaching might develop in the future.     

Vicarious learning from dialogue and discourse -- A controlled comparison

This study examined learning in the domain of sentence parsing and syntax tree-diagram construction. The aim of the study was to assess whether subjects could learn vicariously from recordings of interactions between a previous student and a tutor.Four intervention conditions and a control condition were compared. Subjects in a dialogue group (DL) read printed tutorial notes and subsequently vicariously viewed dynamic (animated) recordings of tree diagrams being constructed by a previous student in the presence of a tutor.The discourse (DI) condition was similar except that subjects viewed recordings of tree diagrams being constructed by a tutor who concurrently verbalised instructional discourse.In a third condition (DO), subjects viewed tree-diagram construction animation clips which were not annotated with either dialogue or discourse. In a linear text (LT) condition, subjects were given only printed tutorial notes. A control (CO) condition involved pre and post testing without any intervention.Results indicated that the dialogue condition was as effective as the discourse condition. This provides support for contention that re-usable dialogue is a useful resource for the vicarious learner. Another finding was that un-annotated animated diagrams were surprisingly effective. Several reasons for their effectiveness are suggested from the literature on instructional animations.     

Expanding our understandings of urban science education by expanding the roles of students as researchers

In this article, we explore the roles of student researchers as they have emerged over 5 years of studies on the teaching and learning of science in urban high schools. These studies incorporate sociocultural theory in an approach to research that explores the capital that urban students bring to school and situates student researchers as active participants who exercise agency by accessing and appropriating a variety of resources. We provide examples of students engaged as productive, central members of a research team and describe the roles in which they have participated, from teacher educators and science learners to curriculum developers and ethnographers. We show how the involvement of students as researchers, within these roles, allows them to produce and select artifacts and data resources for interpretation that offer unique insider perspectives on how to improve the teaching and learning of science for urban high school students. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 42: 807–828, 2005     

Volume XXXIV, 2004

volume contents

Volume XXXIV, 2004     

Relationships between formal reasoning ability,locus of control,academic engagement and integrated process skill achievement

Twelve pupils from each of thirteen middle school science classes participated in the study. Measures were obtained for each pupil on nine engagement modes. Two engagement measures, attending and generalizing, together with formal reasoning ability, were related to process skill achievement and retention. Formal reasoning ability was the strongest predictor of process skill achievement and retention, accounting for approximately 36% of the variance in each case. Formal reasoning ability and locus of control were each correlated with specific engagement modes. Formal reasoning ability was positively related with rates of generalizing and comprehending. Locus of control was significantly related with rates of attending and total engagement.