Village Elders’ and Secondary School Students’ Explanations of Natural Phenomena in Papua New Guinea

This research investigated the sources of explanations and understanding of natural phenomena in terms of the students’ cultural and school science experiences. The first phase involved interviews with eight village elders that probed their explanations and understanding of natural phenomena. The second phase involved the design, development and administration of two questionnaires on natural phenomena to 179 students in a rural boarding high school in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Most village elders gave explanations of many of the phenomena in terms of spirits, spells, magic, religion, and personal experiences. Most school-aged students choose scientific explanations of natural phenomena in terms of what they had learned in school or from personal experiences. However, many choose explanations of the same phenomena about spirits, spells and magic that came from the village, family or home. The study revealed that students’ ideas about natural phenomena are strongly governed and controlled by their school science knowledge in the school setting. It is likely that their own traditional knowledge cannot be identified in a school setting but that questionnaires in the students’ local language be given to students in their villages (as opposed to school). In addition, so as not to diminish the value of this traditional knowledge, science education programs are needed that are able to consider and harmonise traditional knowledge with school science.     

DEVELOPING AN UNDERSTANDING OF IONS IN JUNIOR SECONDARY SCHOOL CHEMISTRY

There is growing research interest in the challenges and opportunities learners face in representing scientific understandings, processes and reasoning. These challenges include integrating verbal, visual and mathematical modes in science discourse to make strong conceptual links between representations and classroom experiences. Our paper reports on a project that aimed to identify practical and theoretical issues entailed in a representation-intensive approach to guiding students’ conceptual learning in science. We focus here on a teacher developing students’ understanding of the formation of ions and molecules. We argue that the representations produced by students in this process met the criteria for representational competence proposed by diSessa (Cognition and Instruction, 22, 293–331, 2004) and Kozma & Russell (2005). The students understood that an effective representation needed to show relevant information, focus on pertinent points, be self-sufficient in its claims about the topic and provide coherent links between different parts of the representation. The final activity showed that their representations reached Kozma & Russell’s (2005) highest level of competence, where the students were able to use specific features of their representations to critique their suitability for explaining bonding and were able to show how their representation linked to the periodic table as a representation. We conclude by considering the implications of these findings.     

Engaging students in learning science through promoting creative reasoning

ABSTRACT

Student engagement in learning science is both a desirable goal and a long-standing teacher challenge. Moving beyond engagement understood as transient topic interest, we argue that cognitive engagement entails sustained interaction in the processes of how knowledge claims are generated, judged, and shared in this subject. In this paper, we particularly focus on the initial claim-building aspect of this reasoning as a crucial phase in student engagement. In reviewing the literature on student reasoning and argumentation, we note that the well-established frameworks for claim-judging are not matched by accounts of creative reasoning in claim-building. We develop an exploratory framework to characterise and enact this reasoning to enhance engagement. We then apply this framework to interpret two lessons by two science teachers where they aimed to develop students’ reasoning capabilities to support learning.     

Validation of a model of personalised learning

This article focuses on a Personalised Learning model which has 19 scales that were used to evaluate regional students’ perceptions of their readiness to learn, assessment processes, engagement, extent to which their learning is personalised and their associations with academic efficacy, academic achievement and student well-being. The data came from an average of 2700 students during each year of a 3-year study in six schools in provincial Victoria. A previously reported instrument was developed to measure students’ and teachers’ perceptions of the above factors affecting the implementation of Personalised Learning Plans (PLPs). It employed the latest scales to assess a range of PLP indicator variables, with all scales modified for use in an Australian context and with the total number of items kept to a minimum. Only scales that were more sensitive to PLPs were used in order to minimise the length of the instrument. There were three outcome variables: academic efficacy, academic achievement and student well-being. The emergent model demonstrates that addressing personalisation of learning and well-being depends on a combination of factors rather than “just getting one factor right”. This implies that there is a need for a coherent and collaborative approach for addressing the needs of students of low socioeconomic status.     

Identifying Exemplary Science Teachers Through Their Classroom Interactions with Students

The purpose of the study described in this paper was to use the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction (QTI) to identify and describe exemplary science teachers. With a sample of over 493 science students, the reliability of the QTI scales ranged from 0.69–0.87. The exemplary teachers were identified as those whose students' perceptions were more than one standard deviation above the mean on the scales of Leadership, Helping/Friendly, and Understanding and more than one standard deviation below the mean on the Uncertain, Dissatisfied and Admonishing scales. The construct validity of the QTI to identify these exemplary teachers was confirmed through interviews with students and these views are reported in the article. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Changing Primary Students’ Perceptions of Teacher Interpersonal Behaviours in Science

The paper reports on part of a large-scale study aimed at examining students’ perceptions of teacher–student interactions. This paper will report on a study utilising mixed methodology in 12 Queensland primary classrooms. After the students’ perceptions were established, the teachers, through a consultative process, developed strategies to change the students’ perceptions of their classroom over a 3 month period. The paper reports on what strategies these teachers utilised and what changes in students’ perceptions resulted. The classroom teachers were interviewed about the change in students’ perceptions, what changes they had sought to promote in their classrooms, and what they felt had been achieved in their classrooms. The study found that students were able to articulate what changes the teacher had implemented, what their reaction was to these changes and their perception of the classroom environment as a result of these implemented strategies.     

Upper Secondary Bruneian Science Students’ Perceptions of Assessment

The aims of this study were to evaluate reliability and validity of the Students’ Perception of Assessment Questionnaire (SPAQ), to evaluate students’ perception on assessment, and to evaluate gender‐based, grade‐based, and ethnicity‐based differences in students’ perceptions. The validity and reliability coefficients revealed that the SPAQ was suitable for assessing students’ perceptions on five assessment dimensions. The average scale‐item mean values for all the scales were less than 3.0, which indicates a need to address these dimensions of assessment at classroom level. The mean value for Student Consultation scale was 1.96 out of 4, indicating a need for special attention in this area. The perceptions of students grouped on the basis of gender and of grade level groups were comparable, but on the basis of ethnic groups were statistically significantly different. Assuming these differences to be real, does it mean that teaching approaches will need to be addressed? Future research in this area is warranted.     

Using Multi-Modal Representations to Improve Learning in Junior Secondary Science

There is growing research interest in both the challenges and opportunities learners face in trying to represent scientific understanding, processes and reasoning. These challenges are increasingly well understood by researchers, including integrating verbal, visual and mathematical modes in science discourse, and making strong conceptual links between classroom experiences and diverse 3D and 2D representations. However, a matching enhanced pedagogy of representation-rich learning opportunities, including their theoretical justification, is much less clearly established. Our paper reports on part of a three-year project to identify practical and theoretical issues entailed in developing a pedagogical framework to guide teacher understanding and practices to maximize representational opportunities for learners to develop conceptual understandings in science.     

IMPACT OF A REPRESENTATIONAL APPROACH ON STUDENTS’ REASONING AND CONCEPTUAL UNDERSTANDING IN LEARNING MECHANICS

The aim of this study was to explore whether a representational approach could impact on the scores that measure students’ understanding of mechanics and their ability to reason. The sample consisted of 24 students who were undergraduate, preservice physics teachers in the State University of Malang, Indonesia. The students were asked to represent a claim, provide evidence for it, and then, after further representational manipulations, refinement, discussion, and critical thought, to reflect on and confirm or modify their original case. Data analysis was based on the pretest–posttest scores and students’ responses to relevant phenomena during the course. The results showed that students’ reasoning ability significantly improved with a d-effect size of 2.58 for the technical aspects and 2.51 for the conceptual validity aspects, with the average normalized gain being 0.62 (upper–medium) for the two aspects. Students’ conceptual understanding of mechanics significantly improved with a d-effect size of about 2.50 and an average normalized gain of 0.63. Students’ competence in mechanics shifted significantly from an under competent level to mastery level. This paper addresses statistically previously untested issues in learning mechanics through a representational approach and does this in a culture that is quite different from what has been researched so far using student-generated representational learning as a reasoning tool for understanding and reasoning.