Integrating inquiry based learning in physics teacher education through a seminar about processes of gaining knowledge in science

Abstract

Internalizing the process and methods of scientific research is fundamental both for young people who are getting prepared to work as scientific researchers, as well as for those who participate in social discourses on scientific issues as responsible citizens. In addition, many current problems can not only be solved from a specialist perspective; interdisciplinary cooperation plays an important role in research and society. It is therefore important that teachers know teaching concepts that enable students to acquire competencies to be prepared for these challenges in life. To implement this, a new pre-service teacher study curriculum was developed as part of the MINTplus2 (engl. STEMplus2) project at TU Darmstadt, which conveys interdisciplinary teaching approaches, especially about STEM. As a part of this project, we developed a new seminar which focusses especially on didactic concepts like inquiry-based learning in order to prepare pre-service science teachers to convey their students the methodological knowledge of the scientific research process. This paper shows the seminar structure embedded in the whole project and the first evaluation results with n=14 concept maps of seven students that show that there is a measurable increase in knowledge regarding the seminar topic.