Science Teaching Practices in Junior Secondary Schools

Abstract

This chapter presents an investigation into science classroom practices in junior secondary schools. The investigation measures students’ experiences of instruction through a student survey of their instructional experiences and attempts to provide insights about using this information in the evaluation and planning of instruction. The study involves 1,324 students from 16 junior high schools of different levels of academic prestige in a well-developed city in the Jiangsu province of China. The schools are of three types, A, B, and C, with the A schools being highest in academic standing and C schools being lowest in academic standing. The students’ reports of actual instruction indicate that they often or very often experienced direct teaching, occasionally experienced cooperative teaching, and seldom or rarely experienced constructivist teaching. This pattern was consistent across all school types, although the students in higher-ranked schools reported significantly lower cooperative teaching and constructivist teaching than did counterparts in the lower-ranked schools. Attitudes showed a small but statistically significant difference among the school types, with students in the higher-ranked schools having lower attitude. The findings also show that students’ attitudes are significantly higher when they experience instructional strategies that encourage student cooperation and conceptual development. Drawing on these findings, if increased attitudes toward science are a desirable outcome of science teaching, then one possible avenue is to increase the use of cooperative and constructivist instructional strategies in class. However, as the present study did not experimentally manipulate the extent of cooperative, constructivist, or direct teaching, additional research is needed to test such a conjecture.