Relationships between prospective elementary teachers' classroom practice and their conceptions of biology and of teaching science

✍ Scribed by Helen Meyer; B. Robert Tabachnick; Peter W. Hewson; John Lemberger; Hyun-Ju Park

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 152 KB
• Volume: 83
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0097-0352
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1098-237x(199905)83:3<323::aid-sce4>3.0.co;2-e

✦ Synopsis

This article describes the journeys-in the form of case studies-that three individuals took as they prepared to become elementary teachers of science. These prospective teachers were in a science teacher education program whose goal was to graduate teachers who held conceptual change beliefs of teaching science and were disposed to put them into practice. It describes these prospective teachers' conceptions of teaching science and selected portions of their knowledge base in life science, and explores how these conceptions, along with their teaching actions, developed during the course of the program. There are several conclusions. First, all three individuals started the program with views of learning in which the learners' role was to be receptive to the knowledge presented from other sources. There were considerable differences between the three individuals with respect to their initial perspectives on the nature of knowledge and of science. Second, there were changes in these prospective teachers' content knowledge, largely with respect to the quality, rather than the quantity, of what they knew. Third, all three prospective elementary teachers made progress in the direction of the goals of the program, although in different ways that were dependent on their own conceptions of knowledge, science, and learning. Fourth, all three individuals came to accept that students' views were important, but interpreted the significance of these views in different ways. Finally, there was evidence of unevenness in the relative development of their thoughts about teaching science and their actions in teaching science. This meant that there were some aspects of