Editorial and call for papers: Design in science education

✍ Scribed by Charles W. Anderson; Kathleen Hogan

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 8 KB
• Volume: 36
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-4308
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1098-2736(199911)36:9<975::aid-tea2>3.0.co;2-3

✦ Synopsis

Science educators are designers as well as researchers; we work both to understand and to improve science teaching and learning. We design teaching materials, teacher preparation programs, professional development programs, laboratory activities, informal learning activities, and programs based on information technology. Despite its central role in our field, the design work of science educators has generally been poorly represented in this journal.

An important obstacle to publishing about design work in journals such as the Journal of Research in Science Teaching (JRST ) is that typically such work is reported in evaluation studies that make neither strong links to relevant empirical literature nor contributions to theory. Other obstacles are technical. Evaluation reports or methods studies in which one method (e.g., inquiry laboratories, student journals, cooperative group work) is shown to be superior to another (e.g., "traditional teaching") are often inadequate because readers are not provided with details about what exactly was being evaluated or compared. Activities and accounts of participants' experiences are buried in a technical report-or not available at all.

The result has been that the research community has not paid adequate attention to innovations and issues in science education design, and designers of programs and materials have paid little attention to research. Much research has conformed to academic traditions that have little of clear relevance to say about design work in science education.

We hope to change this trend by encouraging the submission of articles that describe research-based design work and give readers access to detailed descriptions of the programs and evaluation data. We envision publishing articles in at least three categories.