i Tal

Patterns of teacher‐museum staff relationships: School visits to the educational centre of a science museum

The article describes a study of teachers’ and museum personnel’s perceptions of class visits to an education centre at a large science museum in Israel and follows up their communication and interactions before, during, and at the completion of a museum visit. We identified three levels of communication: administrative’ content, and pedagogical-content, and observed three patterns of teachers’ behaviour: involved, follows school’s tradition and passive. A major difference was found with regards to the teachers’ school. Elementary school teachers tended to rely completely on the museum staff in planning the visit, and rarely prepared their students in advance or took an active part during the class visit. Secondary school teachers on the other hand, were found to be more active while planning the visit and during the class visit. The museum staff preferred more involved teachers, but did not make any explicit attempts to encourage the teachers to be more active. It appears that “the teachers get what they want” or what the museum staff believes the teachers want.RésuméL’article décrit une étude sur les impressions des enseignants et du personnel d’un musée sur les visites de classes effectuées au centre éducatif d’un grand musée scientifique en Israël, et documente leurs communications et interactions avant, pendant et après la visite du musée. Nous avons identifié trois niveaux de communication: le plan administratif, le plan des contenus et le plan des contenus pédagogiques, et nous avons observé trois modèles de comportements chez les enseignants: la participation active, un comportement fondé sur les traditions de l’école et le comportement passif Nous avons noté une différence importante selon le type d’école. Les enseignants du primaire tendaient à donner carte blanche au personnel du musée pour ce qui est de la planification de l’activité, ne préparaient guère leurs élèves avant la visite et ne prenaient aucune part active lors de la visite elle-même. Les enseignants du secondaire, pour leur part, étaient plus actifs aussi bien lors de la planification que durant la visite. Quand aux membres du personnel du musée, ils préfèrent en général que les enseignants participent activement, mais ne font aucun effort pour encourager explicitement les enseignants à être plus actifs. Il semble donc que «les enseignants obtiennent ce qu’ils souhaitent», ou encore qu’ils obtiennent ce que le personnel du musée croit qu’ils souhaitent.

Reflective Practice as a Means for Preparing to Teach Outdoors in an Ecological Garden

Although teachers are engaged in many field-trips, they seldom have the pedagogical knowledge and experience to enact them. This article presents an effort to support reflective practice of teachers in the outdoors. The teaching experience of five pre- and in-service teachers included preparation for teaching in the outdoors, designing learning materials, teaching elementary and junior-high school students in an ecogarden, and reflecting upon these teaching experiences. The data collected by teachers and researchers highlighted challenges such as lack of confidence, class management and inadequate student motivation. The group and the instructors’ support and collaboration and careful preparation yielded a positive outdoor teaching experience. We suggest that supported field experience followed by individual and group reflection are promising in encouraging teachers to carry out outdoor learning activities.

Implementing multiple assessment modes in an interdisciplinary environmental education course

Environmental education promotes the use of higher‐order thinking skills, encourages informal experiences in school as well as outdoors and brings together children and adults in order to make a contribution to the environment. Its holistic nature, that encompasses various subject matters, learning environments and teaching methods and encourages cognitive, affective and behavioural outcomes, requires the implementation of an appropriate assessment framework. In this study the author introduced a complex assessment method that encompasses pre, in‐ and after‐course assessments and incorporates instruments that assess knowledge, reasoning, decision‐making and the active involvement of 27 senior pre‐service science and technology teachers who participated in an environmental education course. Findings indicate that the multiple assessment modes employed expressed a wide range of learning in the course. The team investigation project was found to be most suitable for developing environmental awareness, as well as inquiry skills. Self and peer assessment enhanced critical thinking and continuous discussion. The students acknowledged the complex assessment method as a possible model for an assessment framework which corresponds to the unique nature of learning in environmental education. The assessment framework introduced included aspects of environmental knowledge as well as awareness, skills, attitudes, values and practical involvement and addressed most of the course’s basic ideas and components.

Assessing Learning in the Outdoors with the Field Trip in Natural Environments (FiNE) Framework

The development and application of a framework that captures main characteristics of learning in nature—the Field Trip in Natural Environments (FiNE) framework—is the main outcome of this study that followed up 22 daily field trips of 4–6th grade students to nature parks. The theoretical and practical framework, which was developed based on the research literature and the data collected, allows systematic analysis of various phases of the field trip: preparation, pedagogy, activity and outcomes. The FiNE framework incorporates multiple views of the researchers and participants and examines the pedagogy employed and the outcomes as reported by the participating students. The employment of the framework indicates limited preparation and the use of traditional pedagogies and highlights the importance of social interactions and physical and learning activity. The FiNE framework provides researchers with a plausible scheme to assess various components of field trips to nature and to elucidate possible outcomes of such experiences.

An experience for the lifelong journey: the long-term effect of a class visit to a science center.

ABSTRACT The aim of this study was to explore the multiple outcomes of a class visit to a science center, and to investigate changes in these outcomes over time. The study is significant because relatively little research has been conducted on the long-term effects of school museum visits. The study was carried out in the National Museum of Science, Technology and Space in Israel, which is the largest science museum in the country. Participants were 8th-grade students who had a guided visit in the museum. Students from this class were interviewed immediately after and then again 16 months after the visit. The short- and the long-term interviews were analyzed according to 3 main categories that addressed meaningful learning outcomes: connecting knowledge, communicating knowledge, and fostering lifelong learning. After 16 months the students retained details of the experience; indicated the contribution of the visit to their knowledge; and emphasized peer interactions during the visit. This highlights the significant educational values that students take to their lifes journey from the informal learning experience.

Out-of-School: Learning Experiences, Teaching and Students’ Learning

Two issues that are widely discussed across the informal science education literature are presented and discussed: freedom of choice and learning in out-of-school settings. The third issue, how the visit is facilitated is associated mainly with school visits to informal science institutions. The objectives of a school visit are different than the voluntary visit. Students are not asked if they want to have a field trip, and commonly, they do not take part in planning the learning experience. Teachers either have curriculum-related objectives or have vague ideas about the visit objectives. Consequently, structured activities are employed. This chapter discusses the subtle balance between well-defined and ill-defined tasks, between scaffolding, structuring and freedom, and between student-centered and task-centered activities.

Pre-Service Teachers' Reflections on Awareness and Knowledge Following Active Learning in Environmental Education.

This study focuses on the pre-service teachers’ reflection on an environmental knowledge questionnaire administered in an introductory environmental education course. Reflection sheets that addressed pre-/post-course knowledge questionnaires were collected from 75 students who took the course in three consecutive years. The students represented diverse ethnic and professional background, which is typical in teacher training programs in Israel. The students’ initial environmental knowledge was poor but increased substantially after the course. Their reflections addressed their knowledge acquisition, as well as their growing awareness. They reflected upon the variety of teaching methods and especially on the online debate forum and on the field trips, claiming that these methods contributed a great deal to their learning. However, fewer statements addressed behavioral changes with respect to the environment. In spite of the improvement in the students’ awareness and knowledge, it is suggested that further environmental education is required to continue the transformation process.

Enhancing the Authenticity of a Web-Based Module for Teaching Simple Inheritance

In this chapter, we view socio-scientific issues (SSI) as contributing to dialogic argumentation (Ash & Wells, 2006; Driver, Newton, & Osborne, 2000; Tal & Kedmi, 2006) and as enhancing the ability to assess scientific information and data (Jimenez-Aleixandre, Rodriguez, & Duschl, 2000; Zohar & Nemet, 2002), which both contribute to scientific literacy of students in middle and lower high school grades (Roth & Calabrese Barton, 2004). Teaching science through socioscientific issues is in line with ideas brought up by the Science-Technology-Society (STS) movement (Aikenhead, 1994; Hodson, 1994, 1998) that continued to develop into ideas about humanistic science teaching and teaching citizen science (Aikenhead, 2005; Calabrese Barton, 2003; Roth & Calabrese Barton, 2004; Tal & Kedmi, 2006). The essence of all these ideas is that the science content should be situated in real, important, and often controversial issues that gain the public’s interest. Ratcliffe and Grace (2003) identified the following characteristics in socioscientific issues: they have a basis in science as they are frequently at the frontiers of scientific knowledge; they involve forming opinions, making choices at personal and societal levels; they are frequently reported by media; they deal with incomplete information; they address local, national, and global dimensions; they involve some cost-benefit analysis in which risk interacts with values; they may involve considerations of sustainable development; they involve values and ethical reasoning; they may require some understanding of probability and risk; they are frequently topical with transient life (pp. 2–3).

Education for sustainability in higher education: a multiple-case study of three courses

Education for sustainability (EfS) in higher education is an emerging specialisation within the general field of EfS. EfS encompasses cognitive, affective and behavioural aspects, and aims at enhancing a variety of learning outcomes in these domains and reaching students from all programmes. One of the main challenges for higher education educators is to design courses in a way that will effectively promote the various learning outcomes of EfS. A central question is how sustainability should be integrated into the curriculum; which topics should be taught and which pedagogies ought to be applied to improve students’ knowledge, skills and motivation to promote sustainable living. The present study aimed to contribute to the knowledge about students’ learning outcomes yielded by different designs of EfS courses. This multiple-case study of three courses used a mixed-methods design. For each course, we identified its characteristics and analysed students’ self-reported learning outcomes. We found that: (1) a course with a higher degree of participatory learning, employing a system approach, promoted the highest and most varied learning outcomes; (2) the lecture-based course yielded the fewest learning outcomes; and (3) field trips promoted learning outcomes only when accompanied by more advanced pedagogies.

Peer Learning and Support of Technology in an Undergraduate Biology Course to Enhance Deep Learning

This study offers an innovative and sustainable instructional model for an introductory undergraduate course. The model was gradually implemented during 3 yr in a research university in a large-lecture biology course that enrolled biology majors and nonmajors. It gives priority to sources not used enough to enhance active learning in higher education: technology and the students themselves. Most of the lectures were replaced with continuous individual learning and 1-mo group learning of one topic, both supported by an interactive online tutorial. Assessment included open-ended complex questions requiring higher-order thinking skills that were added to the traditional multiple-choice (MC) exam. Analysis of students’ outcomes indicates no significant difference among the three intervention versions in the MC questions of the exam, while students who took part in active-learning groups at the advanced version of the model had significantly higher scores in the more demanding open-ended questions compared with their counterparts. We believe that social-constructivist learning of one topic during 1 mo has significantly contributed to student deep learning across topics. It developed a biological discourse, which is more typical to advanced stages of learning biology, and changed the image of instructors from “knowledge transmitters” to “role model scientists.”