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1.
Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) are frequently being used as a vehicle to transform science education. This study explored elementary teachers' perceptions about the impact of participating in a science PLC on their own professional development. With the use of The Science Professional Learning Communities Survey and a semi-structured interview protocol, elementary teachers' perceptions of the goals of science PLCs, the constraints and benefits of participation in PLCs, and reported differences in the impact of PLC participation on novice and experienced teachers were examined. Sixty-five elementary teachers who participated in a science PLC were surveyed about their experiences, and a subsample of 16 teachers was interviewed. Results showed that most of the teachers reported their science PLC emphasized sharing ideas with other teachers as well as working to improve students' science standardized test scores. Teachers noted that the PLCs had impacted their science assessment practices as well as their lesson planning. However, a majority of the participants reported a differential impact of PLCs depending on a teacher's level of experience. PLCs were reported as being more beneficial to new teachers than experienced teachers. The interview results demonstrated that there were often competing goals and in some cases a loss of autonomy in planning science lessons. A significant concern was the impact of problematic interpersonal relationships and communication styles on the group functioning. The role of the PLC in addressing issues related to obtaining science resources and enhancing science content knowledge for elementary science teachers is discussed.  相似文献   

2.
In this article, we present a mixed-methods study of 2 schools’ elementary science programs including outdoor instruction specific to each school's culture. We explore fifth-grade students in measures of science knowledge, environmental attitudes, and outdoor comfort levels including gender and ethnic differences. We further examine students’ science and outdoor views and activity choices along with those of adults (teachers, parents, and principals). Significant differences were found between pre- and posttest measures along with gender and ethnic differences with respect to students’ science knowledge and environmental attitudes. Interview data exposed limitations of outdoor learning at both schools including standardized test pressures, teachers’ views of science instruction, and desultory connections of alternative learning settings to ‘school' science.  相似文献   

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5.
This study examined prospective elementary teachers' learning about scientific inquiry in the context of an innovative life science course. Research questions included: (1) What do prospective elementary teachers learn about scientific inquiry within the context of the course? and (2) In what ways do their experiences engaging in science investigations and teaching inquiry‐oriented science influence prospective elementary teachers' understanding of science and science learning and teaching? Eleven prospective elementary teachers participated in this qualitative, multi‐participant case study. Constant comparative analysis strategies attempted to build abstractions and explanations across participants around the constructs of the study. Findings suggest that engaging in scientific inquiry supported the development more appropriate understandings of science and scientific inquiry, and that prospective teachers became more accepting of approaches to teaching science that encourage children's questions about science phenomena. Implications include careful consideration of learning experiences crafted for prospective elementary teachers to support the development of robust subject matter knowledge.  相似文献   

6.
Although parent–teacher interaction is a key factor for children's education, little attention has been paid to this issue in teacher education programs. This study explores and examines the opinions of elementary preservice teachers about parental involvement in elementary children's education. While a total of 223 preservice teachers from a large research university in the southeast of United States participated in the quantitative part, twelve preservice teachers within the same sample who were at the end of their student teaching participated in the qualitative part of the study. Study results suggested that teacher education programmes where parental involvement instruction and activities are integrated into the courses help preservice teachers become better prepared and carry positive opinions toward parental involvement.  相似文献   

7.
This study investigated whether listening to spontaneous conversations of elementary students and their teachers/chaperones, while they were visiting a zoo, affected preservice elementary teachers' conceptions about planning a field trip to the zoo. One hundred five preservice elementary teachers designed field trips prior to and after listening to students' conversations during a field trip to the zoo. In order to analyze the preservice teachers' field trip designs, we conducted a review of the literature on field trips to develop the field trip inventory (FTI). The FTI focussed on three major components of field trips: cognitive, procedural, and social. Cognitive components were subdivided into pre-visit, during-visit, and post-visit activities and problem-solving. Procedural components included information about the informal science education facility (the zoo) and the zoo staff and included advanced organizers. Social components on student groups, fun, control during the zoo visit, and control of student learning. The results of the investigation showed that (a) the dominant topic in conversations among elementary school groups at the zoo was management, (b) procedural components were mentioned least often, (c) preservice teachers described during-visit activities more often than any other characteristic central to field trip design, (d) seven of the nine characteristics listed in the FTI were noted more frequently in the preservice teachers' field trip designs after they listened to students' conversations at the zoo, and (e) preservice teachers thought that students were not learning and that planning was important.  相似文献   

8.
Using the National Research Council's inquiry continuum framework, we use a multiple-case study research design to investigate the teacher- and student-directedness of elementary preservice teachers’ planned and enacted science lessons and their pedagogical reasoning about science instruction during a semester-long science methods course. Our specific research questions were (1) What ideas do elementary preservice teachers bring to a science teaching methods course about the inquiry continuum? and (2) How do their ideas about the inquiry continuum change over the course of the semester through engaging in planning, enactment, and reflection upon science instruction? Participants’ course artifacts (journals, reflective teaching assignments, and lesson plan rationales), interviews, and field observations of their enacted science lessons served as data for this study. Findings show that although the preservice teachers began the semester defining inquiry as highly student-directed, their ideas and definitions broadened over the course of the semester to include and embrace more teacher-directed forms of inquiry. Their early science lessons were more student-directed but, as they encountered challenges engaging in inquiry-based instruction and increasingly emphasized students’ learning needs, they began to plan and enact lessons that were more teacher-directed. Teacher education programs need to explicitly emphasize these variations of inquiry as a core component of supporting preservice teachers’ learning to teach science as inquiry.  相似文献   

9.
This investigation sought to identify patterns in elementary science teachers’ computer simulation use, particularly implementation structures and instructional supports commonly employed by teachers. Data included video-recorded science lessons of 96 elementary teachers who used computer simulations in one or more science lessons. Results indicated teachers used a one-to-one student-to-computer ratio most often either during class-wide individual computer use or during a rotating station structure. Worksheets, general support, and peer collaboration were the most common forms of instructional support. The least common instructional support forms included lesson pacing, initial play, and a closure discussion. Students’ simulation use was supported in the fewest ways during a rotating station structure. Results suggest that simulation professional development with elementary teachers needs to explicitly focus on implementation structures and instructional support to enhance participants’ pedagogical knowledge and improve instructional simulation use. In addition, research is needed to provide theoretical explanations for the observed patterns that should subsequently be addressed in supporting teachers’ instructional simulation use during professional development or in teacher preparation programs.  相似文献   

10.
While a solid understanding of science content knowledge is important in developing expertise in science teaching, it is not necessarily a sufficient condition to teach science effectively in elementary schools. Teachers need to have the ability to transform their knowledge into forms learnable by students. Based on this perspective, the current study explored how science content knowledge was pedagogically transformed in Korean elementary classrooms. Data sources included video-recorded science lessons of five elementary teachers in a metropolitan city of Korea. The analysis of the data revealed that the Korean teachers often engaged in transforming science content knowledge by means of different semiotic modes, including language, pictures, materials, actions, and their complex combinations. Further, their representations of scientific knowledge were in diverse forms, such as personifications, analogies, quiz questions, pictorial models, diagrams, animations, real-life examples, hand demonstrations, videos, flash tools, and songs-and-dances. Future research involving a wider range of participants, such as students, content specialists, and teachers with weak and strong content understanding, was suggested to confirm the findings of this study and find more various ways of pedagogical transformation of science subject matter knowledge.  相似文献   

11.
Learning science through the process of inquiry is advocated in curriculum documents across many jurisdictions. However, a number of studies suggest that teachers struggle to help students engage in inquiry practices. This is not surprising as many teachers of science have not engaged in scientific inquiry and possibly hold naïve ideas about what constitutes scientific inquiry. This study investigates teachers' self-reported approaches to teaching science through inquiry. Phenomenographic interviews undertaken with 20 elementary teachers revealed teachers identified six approaches to teaching for inquiry, clustered within three categories. These approaches were categorized as Free and Illustrated Inquiries as part of an Experience-centered category, Solution and Method Inquiries as part of a Problem-centered category, and Topic and Chaperoned Inquiries as part of a Question-centered category. This study contributes to our theoretical understanding of how teachers approach Inquiry Teaching and suggests fertile areas of future research into this valued and influential phenomenon broadly known as ‘Inquiry Teaching'.  相似文献   

12.
This study draws upon a qualitative case study to investigate the impact of the high-stakes test environment on an elementary teacher’s identities and the influence of identity maintenance on science teaching. Drawing from social identity theory, I argue that we can gain deep insight into how and why urban elementary science teachers engage in defining and negotiating their identities in practice. In addition, we can further understand how and why science teachers of poor urban students engage in teaching decisions that accommodate school demands and students’ needs to succeed in high-stakes tests. This paper presents in-depth experiences of one elementary teacher as she negotiates her identities and teaching science in school settings that emphasize high-stakes testing. I found that a teacher’s identities generate tensions while teaching science when: (a) schools prioritize high-stakes tests as the benchmark of teacher success and student success; (b) activity-based and participatory science teaching is deemphasized; (c) science teacher of minority students identity is threatened or questioned; and (d) a teacher perceives a threat to one’s identities in the context of high stakes testing. Further, the results suggest that stronger links to identities generate more positive values in teachers, and greater possibilities for positive actions in science classrooms that support minority students’ success in science.
Bhaskar UpadhyayEmail:
Bhaskar Upadhyay   is an assistant professor of science education at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His research focuses on equity and social justice issues in science education; sociocultural influences on teaching and learning of science; and issues of teaching and learning science to immigrant children and parents. He teaches courses concerning equity, diversity, social justice, and multicultural education issues in science teaching and learning.  相似文献   

13.
This paper describes an innovation in teacher education designed to increase the confidence of preservice teachers in their ability to instruct elementary children in hands-on science. The program relied on small group teaching experiences at an on-campus interactive science center to provide preservice teachers with controlled instructional experiences. The findings showed that the program at the science center achieved its aims and benefitted the preservice teachers involved. Interview data suggest that working in peer groups was also a significant factor and supports previous research conducted at the San Francisco Exploratorium. Follow-up research is now needed to determine if supportive peer groups of preservice teachers are needed in order to achieve desirable outcomes.  相似文献   

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15.
This study examined whether the transition practices implemented in preschool-elementary school pairs contribute to children's academic development during the first year of elementary school. Participants were 398 children who moved from 36 preschools to 22 elementary schools in two Finnish towns. Children were tested in respect to their reading, writing, and math skills in the preschool spring and in the grade 1 spring. The most common practices reported by preschool teachers were discussions about the school entrants and familiarizing preschool children with the school environment and the new teacher. Multilevel latent growth modeling showed that the more the preschool teachers and elementary-school teachers implemented various supportive activities during the preschool year, the faster the children's skills developed from preschool to grade 1 spring. Co-operation over curricula and passing on written information about children between the preschool and the elementary school were the best predictors of the children's skills, although they were the least commonly used practices. The need to restructure the transition to elementary school and the use of multiprofessional resources are discussed.  相似文献   

16.
Part of the work of teaching elementary science involves evaluating elementary students' work. Depending on the nature of the student work, this task can be straightforward. However, evaluating elementary students' representations of their science learning in the form of scientific models can pose significant challenges for elementary teachers. To address some of these challenges, we incorporated a modeling-based elementary science unit in our elementary science teaching methods course to support preservice teachers in gaining knowledge about and experience in evaluating students' scientific models. In this study, we investigate the approaches and criteria preservice elementary teachers use to evaluate elementary student-generated scientific models. Our findings suggest that with instruction, preservice elementary teachers can adopt criterion-based approaches to evaluating students' scientific models. Additionally, preservice teachers make gains in their self-efficacy for evaluating elementary students' scientific models. Taken together, these findings indicate that preservice teachers can begin to develop aspects of pedagogical content knowledge for scientific modeling.  相似文献   

17.
The purpose of this case study was to explore the ways in which 3 different informal science experiences in the context of an elementary methods course influenced a group of prospective elementary teachers' ideas about science teaching and learning as well as their understandings about the role of informal science environments to teaching and learning. In order to address this question, data were collected in a period of an academic semester through the following sources: journal entries for each of the 3 experiences, a personal teaching philosophy statement and a 2-hour long semi-structured interview with each of the 12 participants. Open coding techniques were used to analyze the data in order to construct categories and subcategories and eventually to identify emerging themes. The outcomes of the analysis showed that the inclusion of informal science experiences in the context of teacher preparation has the potential to support beginning elementary teachers' development of contemporary ideas about science teaching and learning related to inquiry-based science, the nature of scientific work and the work of scientists, connecting science with everyday life, and making science fun and personally meaningful. These findings are discussed alongside implications for policy, teacher preparation, and research under these themes: (a) addressing reform recommendations; (b) developing positive orientations toward science and science teaching; and (c) constructing understandings about scientists' work.  相似文献   

18.
To help explain the differences in students' performance on internationally administered science assessments, cross-national, video-based observational studies have been advocated, but none have yet been conducted at the elementary level for science. The USA and Germany are two countries with large formal education systems whose students underperform those from peers on internationally administered standardized science assessments. However, evidence from the 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Exam assessment suggests fourth-grade students (9–10 year-olds) in the USA perform higher than those in Germany, despite more instructional time devoted to elementary science in Germany. The purpose of this study is to comparatively analyze fourth-grade classroom science in both countries to learn more about how teachers and students engage in scientific inquiry, particularly explanation-construction. Videorecordings of US and German science instruction (n 1?=?42, n 2?=?42) were sampled from existing datasets and analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. Despite German science lessons being, on average, twice as long as those in the USA, study findings highlight many similarities between elementary science in terms of scientific practices and features of scientific inquiry. However, they also illustrate crucial differences around the scientific practice of explanation-construction. While students in German classrooms were afforded more substantial opportunities to formulate evidence-based explanations, US classrooms were more strongly characterized by opportunities for students to actively compare and evaluate evidence-based explanations. These factors may begin to help account for observed differences in student achievement and merit further study grounded in international collaboration.  相似文献   

19.
To alleviate teachers’ reluctance toward practical work, there has been much discussion on teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge, teaching materials, and failsafe strategies for practical work. Despite these efforts, practical work is still regarded as a challenging task for many elementary science teachers. To understand the complexity of teachers’ conflicts in practical work, this study examines teachers’ ideas about teaching and learning that influence teachers’ decision‐making and action on teaching practical work. More important than knowing technical–rational aspects of practical work is to understand the internal contradictions that teachers have to resolve within themselves regarding their capabilities and beliefs about science teaching and practical work. Using stories and experiences of 38 third‐year university students in a science method course in Korea, we seek to understand the conflicts and negotiations that they experience as they make decisions regarding practical work throughout their course. Reflective writings and group discussions on their lived experiences and concerns were used to probe participants’ ideas on teaching using practical work. From written and verbal data, themes were saturated in terms of the aspects which could (dis)encourage their practice. Results suggest that there are multifactorial challenges in pre‐service teachers’ understandings and concerns in practical work. Besides time, materials, and curriculum, pedagogical assumptions and values also compositely challenge the minds of teachers. As the pre‐service elementary teachers negotiated within themselves the importance of science in classroom and social levels, the question is raised about their identities as pre‐service elementary teachers to appreciate the balance between science teaching and practical work.  相似文献   

20.
The study compares the satisfaction ratings of future and current elementary school teachers with respect to the main aspects of school organization and administration. Data were collected from 66 in-service teachers and 79 preservice teachers in Cyprus. The application of factor analysis on the data resulted in the identification of the following main dimensions of school organization: headmaster's role, school organization, school climate, teacher incentives/work conditions, inspector's role and teachers' role. The comparison of the satisfaction ratings of future and current teachers on the above factors produced the following findings: first, the ratings of the two groups differed significantly for the first four factors. Secondly, future teachers reported lower satisfaction ratings than their in-service counterparts in the headmaster's role, school organization and school climate factors and higher ratings on the teacher incentives/work conditions factor.These discrepancies are considered to constitute causes of concern for educational policy-makers. The high expectations of future teachers on the teacher incentives/work conditions factor are viewed as a probable subsequent cause of cognitive dissonance and job dissatisfaction. On the other hand, the low expectations of future teachers with respect to three factors (headmaster's role, school organization, school climate) are likely to reduce their initial enthusiasm for their job. The implications of the findings for teacher training programmes are discussed, and suggestions are made on ways of reducing discrepancies between the expectations of future teachers and the realities of the workplace.  相似文献   

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