Wen Hua Chang

Affording Explicit-Reflective Science Teaching by Using an Educative Teachers' Guide.

Although researchers have achieved some success in effective nature of science (NOS) teaching, helping teachers teach NOS continues to be a great challenge. The development of an educative teachers’ guide would provide support for NOS teaching. In this study, we explored the effects that a research-based guide had on affording elementary school teachers’ NOS teaching and on improving their students’ understanding of NOS, and investigated key features for designing a NOS teachers’ guide. The design of the teachers’ guide was based mainly on (1) criteria pertaining to educative curriculum materials, (2) previous research concerning teachers’ guides as facilitators of science teachers, and (3) feedback from participants of NOS professional-development workshops. Our study sampled 10 teachers who implemented the NOS-curriculum material. Six of them (Group A) had NOS-learning experience, while the other four teachers (Group B) did not. Data sources included student outcomes on NOS, teachers’ teaching performance of NOS instruction, an open-ended questionnaire, and transcripts of a focus-group interview. The results indicate that the teachers’ guide enables teachers to perceive changes in their beliefs, knowledge, and intention with regard to integrating NOS into the curriculum. Group B exhibited NOS-teaching performance similar to that exhibited by Group A. Group B teachers are capable of improving students’ understanding of NOS through the use of the guide. Three key features for designing NOS teachers’ guides are: (1) explicitly indicating NOS teaching practice, (2) building pedagogical knowledge for NOS teaching, and (3) guiding teachers’ reflection and learning.

Making Science Vivid: Using a Historical Episodes Map.

Many have argued that the inclusion of the history of science in science teaching might promote an understanding of the nature of science as well as the attitudes toward science. However, its inclusion in science teaching may not have the desired effect due to the limited coverage it receives in textbooks and the limited time available for teaching. A historical episodes map (HEM) is thus developed with four storylines and more than 20 events related to the history of science and is designed to fit in with regular teaching topics. A total of 329 students in Grade 7 were involved in the experimental group and the control group. The control group was taught using the textbook only, while the experimental group was also taught using the textbook plus HEM materials and associated discussion. The intervention of such teaching lasted for a month and a half. The findings reveal that the exposure of students to HEM materials did promote the students’ understanding of the nature of science as well as their attitudes toward science.

Investigating the effects of structured and guided inquiry on students’ development of conceptual knowledge and inquiry abilities: a case study in Taiwan

ABSTRACT In order to promote scientific inquiry in secondary schooling in Taiwan, the study developed a computer-based inquiry curriculum (including structured and guided inquiry units) and investigated how the curriculum influenced students’ science learning. The curriculum was implemented in 5 junior secondary schools in the context of a weeklong summer science course with 117 students. We first used a multi-level assessment approach to evaluate the students’ learning outcomes with the curriculum. Then, a path analysis approach was adopted for investigating at different assessment levels how the curriculum as a whole and how different types of inquiry units affected the students’ development of conceptual understandings and inquiry abilities. The results showed that the curriculum was effective in enhancing the students’ conceptual knowledge and inquiry abilities in the contexts of the six scientific topics. After the curriculum, they were able to construct interconnected scientific knowledge. The path diagrams suggested that, due to different instructional designs, the structured and guided inquiry units appeared to support the students’ learning of the topics in different ways. More importantly, they demonstrated graphically how the learning of content knowledge and inquiry ability mutually influenced one another and were reciprocally developed in a computer-based inquiry learning environment.

Design to Understand Curriculum: Epistemic Practices, Teaching, and Learning in Science

Current science curriculum emphasizes the knowledge, skills, and epistemic practices of science. Scientific practices usually involve asking questions, developing models, investigating, constructing explanations, and negotiating meanings. Students are not only expected to acquire more relevant science knowledge, but also to develop the ability to think and reason about phenomena and, furthermore, to take actions and solve problems. However, science teachers utilizing published textbooks and focusing on coverage and neglecting the epistemic practices aspect of science curriculum would restrain the enactment of reformed curriculum. This chapter draws on the paradigm of understanding curriculum and gives examples to illustrate to what extent Taiwanese science teachers enhance their understandings of curriculum, teaching, and learning in science through designing science curriculum modules. We also compare and contrast the approaches of designing professional developing programs in literature and those emerging from the case teachers’ design experiences. Furthermore, we illustrate how teachers’ knowledge about curriculum, teaching, and learning in science interacted with each other and mediated teachers’ learning process. This chapter helps readers understand the trend of curriculum reform in Taiwan, as well as ways science teachers learn under the reform context.

Science curriculum components favoured by high school students in Taiwan

This study examines the curriculum components in biology favoured by high school students in Taiwan. Our sample consisted of 155 senior high school students (51 boys and 104 girls) and 137 junior high school students (74 boys and 63 girls). The questionnaire was based on the idea of a repertory grid technique and was developed to investigate the relative status of the curriculum components as perceived by the students. Descriptive statistics and t-tests were then used to analyse the data. It was found that the students favoured the curriculum components in the following order: Manipulative skills, Scientific concepts, the Application of science, Social issues, Problem solving skills and the History of science. Further comparisons indicated that there were some differences between senior high school students and junior high school students as well as between boys and girls. These findings provide us with aspects that should be seriously considered when developing curricula.

An International Perspective of Monitoring Educational Research Quality: Commonalities and Differences

This chapter considers the notion of educational research quality and evaluation from an international perspective. We consider how and why these approaches differ from the US-based Gold Standard design (i.e., research based on randomized controlled trials [RCTs] mimicking third-stage drug trials; see Shelley, Yore, & Hand, Chap. 1). The Gold Standard is based on the assumption that RCT design alone, regardless of other factors, provides the desired quality. We suggest here that the notion of quality in research and the mechanisms used to evaluate research quality are highly dependent on the overarching aim of education. To illustrate, the governments of many countries see education, especially science education, as a key component in economic progress and as a means of delivering on social services (Coll & Taylor, 2008). Hence, there are a number of reasons why we need to evaluate research quality in science education. We need to provide evidence that our science education regimes (and vocational education and training) do in fact produce outputs in terms of qualified people needed to