Preservice Secondary Science Teachers Research Articles

Developing Secondary Pre-Service Science Teachers’ Instructional Planning Abilities for Language- and Literacy-Integrated Science Instruction in Linguistically Diverse Classrooms

ABSTRACT As science classrooms become more linguistically diverse, it is becoming increasingly important that pre-service teachers (PSTs) are trained with the skills and knowledge they need to support science learning for all students, especially English Learners. The purpose of this study was to determine how 11 secondary science PSTs’ instructional planning for language- and literacy-integrated science instruction changed over the course of their participation in two language- and literacy-integrated science methods courses. Data sources included open-ended survey questions, interviews, and participant-created lesson plans, instructional materials, and reflections. Inductive and deductive qualitative analyses were employed to identify themes across participants and data sources. Results suggest that, following participation in the methods courses, more PSTs integrated language- and literacy-integrated science practices into their instructional materials than prior to the intervention. Further, important changes in the nature of integration were observed. Results add to the emerging literature on preparing secondary science PSTs to teach in linguistically diverse classrooms and have implications for science teacher education and student learning.

Characterising pre-service secondary science teachers’ noticing of different forms of evidence of student thinking

ABSTRACTEvidence of student thinking takes a variety of forms (e.g. verbal responses, gestures) and has varying degrees of visibility within classroom interactions. The purpose of this study was to characterise the nature of pre-service science teachers’ (PSTs’) noticing skills of different forms of evidence of student thinking using video-based interviews. In the interviews, the PSTs were asked to describe what they had noticed in the videos that captured different forms of evidence of student thinking and ‘think on their feet’ to propose the next instructional moves as if they were the teacher. The PSTs’ comments on the videos were analysed qualitatively with respect to the forms of evidence they noticed and how they interpreted and responded to the evidence. Several findings regarding the nature of PSTs’ noticing skills were uncovered. First, the PSTs readily identified non-verbal forms of evidence, such as voting and student actions. However, some forms of evidence that potentially reveal the content of student thought, such as student artefacts, questions and verbal explanations, were less visible to the PSTs. Second, the PSTs used the identified evidence to infer student engagement levels, attributes and understanding and were generally able to propose instructional responses based on the student thinking that they had identified. Third, the findings also suggest that when the PSTs paid attention to the details of the evidence, they were more likely to connect their instructional decisions to student understanding at a content-specific level. The implications for research on PSTs’ noticing and initial education are discussed.

Using Video-Based Interviews to Investigate Pre-service Secondary Science Teachers’ Situation-Specific Skills for Informal Formative Assessment

This study investigated the nature of pre-service science teachers’ (PSTs’) situation-specific skills for informal formative assessment (FA) and their awareness of activating these skills in classroom-like situations. Video-based interviews were conducted to collect data from fifteen PSTs before they participated in a teacher education program. Authentic classroom videos capturing evidence of student thinking were used as probes to elicit information on the PSTs’ perceptions, interpretations, and decision-making in various classroom-like situations that afforded opportunities for FA. The findings indicate that the PSTs tended to focus on content-generic evidence and the responses of students in the whole class, to infer student thinking at a non-content specific level, and to propose responses that were vague or devoid of scientific content. On re-exposure to the same evidence of student thinking captured in short video clips, and with more specific prompting questions, more of the PSTs identified content-specific evidence from individual students and interpreted the nuances of student thinking at a content-specific level. Yet, the capacity of the PSTs to propose student-focused instructional moves remained limited. Overall, the findings suggest that the PSTs were not particularly aware of applying their situation-specific skills for informal FA when making on-the-fly teaching decisions in classroom-like situations that offer rich opportunities for FA. This study adds to the existing understanding of PST knowledge/skills for informal FA and provides a mechanism for eliciting and characterizing teachers’ situation-specific skills for informal FA. The implications for initial teacher education are discussed.

Preservice secondary science teachers’ understanding of academic language: Moving beyond “just the vocabulary”

AbstractTo prepare preservice secondary science teachers to teach English learners (ELs), teacher education programs must provide sustained coursework and experiences in principles and strategies found effective in supporting ELs’ learning of science. In the context of a teacher education program recognized for its attention to ELs, we investigated seven preservice secondary science teachers’ understanding of academic language and of how to support EL students’ use of academic language. More specifically, over the course of their 13‐month program, we examined changes in (a) preservice teachers’ understanding of the three levels of academic language (i.e., lexical, or vocabulary; syntactic, or sentence; and discursive, or message) and (b) the types of instructional support they reported using at each level (e.g., peer collaboration at the discursive level). We also compared their understanding of academic language and instructional support both to their experienced cooperating teachers’ understanding and to their actual classroom practice. From qualitative analysis of data collected, we found that preservice teachers understood academic language as more than just vocabulary—as spanning lexical, syntactic, and discursive levels—although they reported implementing more types of supports at the lexical and discursive levels than at the syntactic level. We also found that preservice teacher participants’ understanding of academic language and instructional support resonated with that of their cooperating teachers and with their own classroom practice. We close with discussion of ways teacher education programs can deepen and broaden preservice secondary science teachers’ understanding of the role of academic language in ELs’ science learning

Developing Preservice Teachers’ Understanding of and Pedagogical Content Knowledge for History of Science–Integrated Science Instruction

Despite its positive impact on students’ understanding of the nature of science and science content knowledge, few secondary science teachers incorporate the history of science into their instruction. This article describes the effects of an online history of science course on preservice teachers’ perceptions of and content and pedagogical knowledge for history of science–integrated science instruction. Eleven secondary preservice science teachers participated in a semester-long history of science course focused on developing their conceptual understanding of and pedagogical knowledge for incorporating history of science into their science instruction. Data were collected from preservice teachers’ discussions, reflections, assignments, and surveys. Results indicate that participation in the online history of science course led to preservice teachers’ understanding of history of science content and pedagogy and to positive perceptions about history of science–integrated science instruction. Preservice teachers also demonstrated skills for developing history of science instructional materials using recurrent, storyline, and argumentation approaches. Implications of the findings for secondary science teacher preparation are discussed.

LNU Pre-service Secondary Science Teachers’ Scientific Literacy and Science Teaching Self-Efficacy

The main purpose of this study is to determine Leyte Normal University’s pre-service secondary science teacher’s scientific literacy and science teaching self-efficacy. Further, the relationship between scientific literacy and science teaching self-efficacy is explored. Participants were 50 fourth-year students enrolled in the BSEd Biological Science program. The survey method was used in this study. The participants’ science teaching self-efficacy was determined by Science Teaching Efficacy Belief Instrument (STEBI-B) developed by Enochs and Riggs (1990), while scientific literacy was measured by Test of Basic Scientific Literacy (TBSL). The results showed that the pre-service teachers’ science teaching self-efficacy is at the medium level. Further, participants had satisfactory scientific literacy levels. The Pearson product–moment correlation revealed a moderately positive relationship between scientific literacy and science teaching self-efficacy.

Getting to the root of the matter: pre-service teachers’ experiences and positionalities with learning to teach in culturally diverse contexts

This study investigated the experiences of a group of pre-service secondary science teachers in learning to teach in culturally diverse contexts. The pre-service teachers were all assigned to placements within a large, urban, culturally diverse public high school and paired with mentor teachers. Through one-on-one interviews, the pre-service teachers were asked to recount and evaluate their experiences, as well as to respond to research-informed deficit beliefs about urban and culturally diverse students and communities. Through critical discourse analysis, the pre-service teachers were characterized as establishing particular positionalities in regards to learning to teach within the culturally diverse context of the high school. The pre-service teachers were, furthermore, characterized as establishing particular positionalities in regards to select deficit beliefs that were discussed in the interviews. The role of agency and institutional power structures in supporting or constraining the positionalities established by the pre-service teachers was also considered. Major implications from this study include the need for teacher education programs to address gaps between pedagogical theory and practice enacted or observed in classrooms; the need to facilitate stronger systems of support for pre-service teacher education from the school-based administration; and positionalities, as indicators of more deeply held beliefs, and how these beliefs may influence teaching and learning.

Preservice Teacher Self-Efficacy for Enhancing Students’ Long-Term Interest in Science

There is currently a great concern among educationalists regarding the widespread decline in student interest in school science. As a result of this decline, our future teachers will be faced with the challenge of enhancing their students’ long-term interest in science. Yet it is not known whether they will have the dispositions necessary to achieve this. Teacher self-efficacy is known to be a relatively accurate predictor of teacher behaviour. The purpose of this study was to investigate preservice teachers’ self-efficacy for enhancing students’ long-term interest in science. The participants were 121 preservice primary teachers and 31 preservice secondary science teachers. Quantitative data were gathered using a survey, and qualitative data were gathered by interviews with 13 participants. It was found that both primary and secondary preservice teachers had moderately positive self-efficacy. This was a welcome finding, because it suggests that if these levels of self-efficacy are maintained, then once they become practicing teachers they will have the necessary disposition to make vigorous efforts to enhance their future students’ interest in science.

Justificaciones de profesorado de ciencias en formación inicial para la selección de actividades educativas. Influencia de una propuesta formativa

Resumen:En este trabajo se presenta una investigación realizada con profesorado en formación de las especialidades de Física y Química y de Biología y Geología del Máster en Profesorado de Educación Secundaria. Se ha llevado a cabo en el contexto de una propuesta formativa centrada en las actividades de enseñanza aprendizaje y su importancia en la planificación de la enseñanza. La finalidad de esta propuesta es la mejora de la competencia docente para el análisis y la selección de actividades de enseñanza y aprendizaje. En concreto, se analizan y se comparan, mediante una metodología pretest-postest las decisiones y justificaciones que los profesores en formación inicial utilizan para la elección de una actividad educativa antes y después de la propuesta formativa. Para el análisis de las respuestas se ha elaborado un sistema de categorías a partir de las justificaciones aportadas y de la revisión de la literatura al respecto. Los resultados obtenidos muestran una mejora en la capacidad de los futuros docentes para justificar sus decisiones, a través de un incremento en el número de justificaciones y una atención creciente a aquellas centradas en las demandas que las actividades plantean al alumnado, acorde con los objetivos de la propuesta formativa.

Eliciting Preservice Teachers’ Reading Strategies Through Structured Literacy Activities

ABSTRACTEducational reform needs to address the role of literacy in science if there is to be any hope of achieving the goal of literacy for all U.S. students. For reading to play a more prominent role in secondary science, teacher education programs need to develop and offer courses that familiarize preservice science teachers with disciplinary literacy. This study examines this question: What tacit reading strategies do preservice science teachers use to understand science texts? This study focuses on structured literacy activities designed to engage preservice secondary science teachers in reading 3 common genres of science texts. Analysis reveals that preservice science teachers use a variety of general comprehension strategies that are consistent with expert reading strategies. Also, preservice science teachers employ reading strategies that attend to genre-specific text features to understand texts. These findings could be used by science teacher educators to inform the design of science methods and disciplinary literacy courses that scaffold the development of pedagogical content knowledge necessary to teach reading as a disciplinary practice.

A Workshop Approach to Developing the Professional Pedagogical Vision of Irish Secondary Preservice Science Teachers

ABSTRACTThis article reports on an investigation of a workshop approach to probe and deepen Irish preservice teachers’ (PSTs’) initial professional pedagogical vision of inquiry-based science education (IBSE). In an effort to understand the experiential and historical foundation of their vision, we report on the current culture of science teaching and assessment within the Irish school system and contrast it with the aims set out at a policy level as a way of contextualizing teacher candidates’ ideas about IBSE. We describe a workshop approach designed to engage PSTs in IBSE activities and an analysis framework that allows us to elicit the PSTs’ professional pedagogical vision, specifically the key practices of coding and highlighting, from critiques of inquiry activities they carried out in the workshop. We offer the workshop approach as a viable complement to video analysis of exemplary teaching episodes and demonstrate the analytical power of the approach by reporting what practices the PSTs highlighted as constituting IBSE and how they coded the purpose of the practices they highlighted. We use these highlighted practices and coded purposes as indicators of their professional pedagogical vision of IBSE, and reveal the extent to which PSTs adapt the tenets of IBSE to fit in with their desire for students to remember science facts.

(Mis)Alignments in Mentorship: Exploring Challenges to Preservice Science Teacher Preparation

ABSTRACTThe mentoring relationships between preservice teachers and their cooperating teachers have been established as critical to the retention or attrition of novice teachers (Clarke, Triggs, & Nielsen, 2014), yet little research has been conducted to examine what factors around mentor teacher selection and support are most salient to creating strong mentoring structures. In this study, we investigated how four U.S. states (one in the Southwest, one in the Northeast, one in the Midwest, and one in the South) recruit mentor teachers for secondary science preservice teachers, what requirements the mentor teachers must possess, how mentor teachers are incentivized to serve in this role, and whether the use of science standards influences decisions related to preservice teacher placement. Our results show that (a) mentor placements are often found through word-of-mouth versus more formalized systems, (b) there is a wide variety of incentives offered to mentor teachers, (c) there is a common minimum standard for teachers to qualify as mentor teachers, and (d) that science standards, including individual state standards or the Next Generation Science Standards, are central to preservice teacher education programs but are not frequently considered by these same programs when they place a preservice teacher with a mentor teacher. Our findings indicate the need for further research to identify what factors are most salient in strong mentoring relationships and what steps can be taken to support and strengthen the mentoring between preservice teachers and their mentor teachers.

Secondary Science Preservice Teachers’ Perceptions of Engineering: A Learner Analysis

The purpose of this study was to describe how US secondary science preservice teachers, or those preparing to teach middle and high school science, at one university, perceive engineering and teaching engineering within an epistemological framework of required domain components pre- and post-instruction (intervention) as well as over three cohort years. Their perceptions reveal relevant prior beliefs helpful for designing instruction to address an external need to prepare secondary science teachers to teach disciplinary content ideas, cross-cutting concepts, and science and engineering practices to meet the Next Generation Science Standards. Questionnaires administered pre- and post-instruction (intervention), as well as over three years, asked participants to decide whether various scenarios qualified as engineering and then to provide reasoning. Intervention instruction included whole-class discussions of engineering design practices. The responses to the questionnaire were analyzed for thematic content. The results indicate that the secondary science preservice teachers (n = 43) have a novice understanding of engineering and teaching engineering. They gain an emerging understanding during the secondary science methods courses, consistent in all three years with expanding perspectives from narrow discipline views. As their perceptions are refined, however, there are risks of oversimplification, which may lead to forming misconceptions. The recommendations for designing instruction such as secondary science methods courses and early career professional development include creating opportunities for preservice and early career teachers to explore and challenge their perceptions of engineering design practices integrated within science and engineering practices.

Engaging Preservice Secondary Science Teachers in an NGSS-Based Energy Lesson: A Nanoscience Context

The new approach to teaching science presented by the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) warrants training high-quality science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers to pr...

The hierarchical (not fluid) nature of preservice secondary science teachers' perceptions of their science teacher identity

This qualitative cross-case study explores three US preservice secondary science teachers' conceptions of their science teacher identities and contexts within which they draw upon those science identities for teaching. Grounded in a figured worlds framework, data analysis revealed that participants view their science teacher identity separate from their science identity, with only the latter being part of their “core” identity. Participants view their teacher identity as dominant, and draw upon their science identity's cultural tools in only two teaching contexts—teaching science content and analyzing student work to facilitate learning. Implications for teacher preparation programs are considered.

Semantics Network Analysis of the Activation Words for `Energy' Terminology Used by Secondary Pre-Service Science Teachers

Semantics Network Analysis of the Activation Words for `Energy' Terminology Used by Secondary Pre-Service Science Teachers

Evidence of Science and Engineering Practices in Preservice Secondary Science Teachers’ Instructional Planning

There is a current national emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Additionally, many states are transitioning to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), which encourage teachers to incorporate engineering in science classrooms as well as have their students learn science by doing science. Methods courses are also shifting to adequately prepare preservice science teachers in these areas. This study examines preservice science teachers’ pre- and post-ideal inquiry-based lesson plan scenarios before and after intervention in their Secondary Science Methods I and II courses. These preservice science teachers participated in a variety of opportunities to practice authentic science inquiry (ASI) pedagogical techniques as well as integrated STEM topics, with a particular emphasis on computer programming throughout their 80 h of Methods instruction. ASI is a type of inquiry where students learn science by conducting science research in a grade-appropriate manner. Thirty-eight preservice teachers’ scenarios were analyzed using a rubric from Spuck (2014) to determine the degree to which the ten components of ASI were included in scenarios pre- to post-instruction. Trends in ASI component inclusion are discussed. These findings indicate that preservice science teachers are proficient at writing inquiry-based lessons where they planned opportunities for their future students to collaborate, use scientific instrumentation, and collect and analyze data, but need additional support with developing student activities where students create testable questions, revise their question and methods, participate in peer review, and disseminate their results to their peers or the larger scientific community. Overall, the results suggest Methods instruction should reinforce preservice teachers’ focus on planning lessons which include opportunities for all ASI components. Interventions in the aforementioned areas of weak inclusion may be beneficial to preservice teachers.

Preservice science teachers’ concerns and approaches for teaching socioscientific and controversial issues

ABSTRACTThe teaching of socioscientific issues (SSI) holds promise for advancing functional scientific literacy, promoting critical thinking, and providing an interesting context for learning required science content, but few teachers actually employ this teaching method in K–12 classrooms. One common reason cited by teachers is their concern about the controversial aspects of teaching these topics. This study attempts to better understand these tensions by exploring preservice secondary science teachers’ ideas, concerns, and approaches for teaching SSI as they move through a semester-long science methods class that specifically addresses teaching about controversial and SSI. Classroom artifact data and individual interviews were used to explore the science concepts deemed most controversial by preservice secondary science teachers and their preferred approaches for teaching these topics. The findings revealed several topics that are deemed controversial, including evolution, climate change, nuclear energy, and reproduction. Preservice teachers also eagerly adopted the methods course’s discussion strategies for teaching about controversial issues. However, preservice teachers did not distinguish between the appropriateness for using different discussion-based, multiple-perspectives approaches for different types of issues. Specifically, preservice teachers often conflated SSI (societal issues that have both scientific and ethical elements) together with societally denied science for which the teaching is controversial (evolution, anthropogenic causes of climate change). Implications of these findings for methods courses and future research are discussed.

El contexto en la enseñanza de la química: Análisis de secuencias de enseñanza y aprendizaje diseñadas por profesores de ciencias de secundaria en formación inicial

The research presented aims at identifying the difficulties pre-service secondary science teachers have in designing context based chemistry teaching and learning sequences (TLS). The question guiding this study is the following: What function do contexts perform within chemistry TLS designed by pre-service secondary science teachers? A content analysis of five chemistry TLS written in 2015-16 by five pre-service secondary science teachers from the master program offered by the five public universities in the community of Catalonia, Spain was conducted. The focus of the analysis dealt with the characteristics of contexts used in TLS using the Rubric of Context Indicators (RIC) created for this purpose. Three TLS contextual profiles have been identified using the 5 RIC context indicators such as authenticity, relevance, persistence, inquiry and construction. All pre-service secondary science teachers from the three contextual profiles have written chemistry TSL showing difficulties in the use of contexts that are persistent along the TLS and promote scientific inquiry.

Secondary Pre-service Science Teachers’ Image of Scientists and Perception on the Science-Related Career

Secondary Pre-service Science Teachers’ Image of Scientists and Perception on the Science-Related Career