Abstract
In this chapter we report on three examples of inquiry investigation activities used within each of our “science methods” courses, where we attempted to model what was expected of pre-service teachers in reformed science classrooms, while at the same time providing the students themselves experiences with engaging in an inquiry investigation environment. We provide a detailed elaboration of each example activity, descriptions of student work with examples of data collected and comments recorded in class. Our analysis of common themes within these examples shows that many pre-service teachers have varying degrees of difficulty in working with data in these (quite different) inquiry activities. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for pre-service teacher education in science.
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Notes
- 1.
Although we are reporting on American data here, our own experiences support the argument that the Canadian condition is little different.
- 2.
The Canadian community of science education professors is small enough that we each know a large segment of our total community and there are reasonably strong social bonds between a great number of us. This leads to socializing at our main conference that is markedly different than in meetings of other organizations such as NARST. For instance, at our largest professional gathering (the annual conference of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education, our equivalent of AERA) the Science Education Research Group might have 30 faculty members (of the 90 or so active ones in Canada) attending and we spend a lot of time socializing with each other, including over a research group dinner that, including graduate students, can easily exceed 30 participants.
- 3.
The four authors are reasonably senior science educators in Canada and are often amongst the most senior people (if not the most senior people) represented at the conference we previously described. As such, and given the large number of younger faculty hired recently in Canada, we felt some sense of obligation to our community to discuss the issues we were encountering in teaching inquiry science teaching approaches to our methods students for if we were having problems then junior faculty would be more likely to discuss their difficulties with others.
- 4.
We both note and acknowledge that we are not presenting “research” in the traditional sense but rather are describing, in the spirit of self-study and reflection (see Bullock & Russell, 2012), a form of self-study done by professionals who are working towards improving their own practices by critically examining and reflecting on those practices to gain insights into how to improve them while hoping that these efforts, conducted as rigorously as possible in our varied settings, may inform the practices of others in our field. As noted earlier, our data collection was not “intentional” while the class was progressing but reflected the notational practices we each typically engage in while teaching. The self-study from which this chapter emerged was a post-hoc endeavor following a realization of the difficulty we had teaching inquiry approaches in science to future high school teachers. We would argue that our post-hoc approach has advantages in that the classes as taught represent our “normal” practices uninfluenced by any supposition that our classes were “under study” of any sort, but it offers disadvantages in that data and information that might normally be collected in a self-study of a teaching environment are lacking.
- 5.
Bencze and Bowen (2009) concluded that for students, apart from positive outcomes regarding science literacy that are developed in science fair projects, there may be some significant issues about the fair that warrant critical review. For instance, it is apparent that there are issues of access, image, and recruitment associated with the fair such that participation in the fair appears to favour students from advantaged, resource-rich backgrounds and, in particular, offers particular advantages to corporate sponsors highlighting their connection to science. The latter frames science as an activity geared primarily to solving economic and monetary/business problems and not one which is more holistically about knowledge generation and developing a deeper understanding of our world.
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Bowen, G.M., Bartley, A., MacDonald, L., Sherman, A. (2016). Experiences with Activities Developing Pre-service Science Teacher Data Literacy. In: Buck, G., Akerson, V. (eds) Enhancing Professional Knowledge of Pre-Service Science Teacher Education by Self-Study Research. ASTE Series in Science Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32447-0_13
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