Abstract
Inquiry teaching in science education has been widely advocated for decades. It is a critical learning objective in many science teacher preparation programs. Despite its importance, it is not effectively implemented in science classrooms. One of the reasons is the lack of reliable and valid instruments that provide practical definition, concrete guideline, and objective assessment for the practice of inquiry teaching. To fill this gap, we designed a 3E rubric based on the 5E learning model as one specific form of inquiry teaching to measure preservice teachers’ practice at different phases of a science lesson. In this study, we thoroughly introduced the 3E rubric and its use. Through drawing on 76 elementary pre-service science teachers’ teaching videos, we analyzed its reliability and validity with the tools of Intraclass Correlation Coefficient, Fleiss’ kappa, and Pearson correlation. According to the results, the 3E rubric is a reliable and valid tool to assess pre-service teachers’ practical knowledge of inquiry teaching. The contributions of this rubric to the teaching and research in science teacher preparation are discussed and future research directions are proposed.
Highlights
Inquiry teaching has been the core in science education reforms for decades (Anderson, 2002; Windschitl, 2003)
There is work challenging inquiry teaching that portrays it as teachers acting in a hands-off manner and students carry out learning through self-guided investigations (Kirschner, Sweller & Clark, 2006), which leads to additional work supporting inquiry teaching while criticizing their opponents for mistakenly defining inquiry teaching (Hmelo-Silver et al, 2007)
This paper suggests a practical definition of inquiry teaching in the context of science teacher preparation
Summary
Inquiry teaching has been the core in science education reforms for decades (Anderson, 2002; Windschitl, 2003). While inquiry teaching is widely advocated, effective examples are rarely observed in many science classrooms (Capps & Crawford, 2013). There are several derivatives of inquiry teaching, such as model-based instruction (Windschitl, Thompson, & Braaten, 2008), problem-based learning (Kolodner et al, 2003) and active learning (Freeman et al, 2013), which share some similarities in nature such as being student-centered and contextrich. Those similarities have not been indisputably summarized or referred to as the defining features of inquiry teaching. Studies examining the effectiveness of inquiry teaching in science classrooms, especially large-scale quantitative studies, rely on students’ perception rather than the actual implementation of inquiry teaching
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