Professionalising Primary School Teachers in Guiding Inquiry-Based Learning

Martina S J Van Uum,Roald P Verhoeff,Marieke Peeters

doi:10.1007/s11165-019-9818-z

Abstract

This paper reports a pretest-posttest study about the impact of a teacher professional development (TPD) programme on primary school teachers’ knowledge of and attitude towards inquiry-based learning. A pedagogical framework of inquiry phases and domains of scientific knowledge combined with hard and soft scaffolds formed the basis for the TPD programme. A total of 59 teachers were divided between the experimental group, which participated in the TPD programme, and a control group. We measured the teachers’ subject matter knowledge (SMK) of the conceptual, epistemic, social, and procedural domain before and after the TPD programme by means of different questionnaires. In addition, we measured their knowledge of how to support their pupils during the inquiry process (PCK) and their attitude towards inquiry-based learning. The results show that our TPD programme improved teachers’ conceptual and social SMK, PCK, and attitude. Our study implicates that scaffolding different domains of scientific knowledge during the inquiry cycle is a valuable component of TPD in inquiry-based learning.

Highlights

In the past decades, there has been growing attention to inquiry-based science education (IBSE; Minner et al 2010)
This paper reports a pretest-posttest study in which we investigated whether and to what extent the teacher professional development (TPD) programme based on inquiry phases and domains of scientific knowledge (Van Uum et al 2016) combined with hard and soft scaffolds (Van Uum et al 2017) contributed to primary school teachers’ knowledge of and attitudes towards IBSE
In order to check whether the experimental and control group did not differ on the pretests of subject matter knowledge (SMK), pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), and attitude, we analysed the results of 24 participants of the experimental group

Summary

Introduction

There has been growing attention to inquiry-based science education (IBSE; Minner et al 2010). Instead of top-down instruction, open IBSE can be viewed as a bottom-up approach, in which pupils formulate their own research question and design and conduct an investigation to answer the question (Windschitl 2003) This does not imply that teachers only observe their pupils. Teachers are often unfamiliar with this way of teaching and learning, as they lack confidence in their own scientific knowledge and ability to teach science (Harlen and Holroyd 1997; Murphy et al 2007b) They experience difficulties in guiding their pupils during the inquiry process (Yoon et al 2012; Zion et al 2007). An example diagram of a central concept connected to related concepts.

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion