Why Science Literacy? A proposed instrument to understand teachers’ views on the purposes of science education

• In Event: Poster Session Group 6
  In Poster Session: Why Science Literacy? A proposed instrument to understand teachers’ views on the purposes of science education

Proposal

Internationally, there have been significant investments in helping teachers learn how to teach science literacy using reform-based approaches (Atkin & Black, 2003; Abd‐El‐Khalick et al., 2004). Yet there is limited attention on how teachers’ goals for developing science literacy influence how they teach. This poster will describe a new line of research for the authors that will lay out the philosophical underpinnings and proposed processes for developing a new instrument to identify the goals of developing science literacy in all primary and secondary students. This instrument will be useful in international settings for comparative purposes. The users of the instrument will be researchers, teacher educators, and professional developers who work with future and current primary and secondary science teachers. This instrument will also be useful for comparative studies where purposes for teaching science for literacy may vary based on national initiatives and grade levels. This instrument could be used within pre-service science methods courses and within professional development settings to not only study changes in participants’ goals but to also help participants better understand their own goals. By better understanding the why’s behind teachers’ reasoning for developing science literacy, we can better understand how they teach and the pedagogical routines they use.

This poster will describe the proposed process for developing this instrument. We will describe literature and international documents that will help us develop quantitative instruments. For example, the work of DeBoer (2000) will help us to understand historical goals of teaching science and content-specific research such as that of Belo, van Driel, van Neek, and Verloop (2014) to understand how content-specific teacher beliefs about the purposes of teaching influence the pedagogical choices they make. We will also review national curriculum documents to look for differences in the goals of developing science-literate students (e.g. National Research Council, 2012). We will then use this literature to develop a theoretical framework to guide the development of and the analysis of interviews and questionnaires. We will describe the constant-comparative methods to analyze interviews and questionnaires to be used to later develop quantitative instruments. The proposed quantitative instrument will ask participants to rank choices from the interviews and questionnaires. For example, we can imagine participants choosing what they feel is more important between ten options in which each pair is set against each other to develop an overall ranking. For example, participants would choose between “The goal of science is to learn science to become informed citizens (e.g. social-related science issues, to vote, to influence policy)” vs. “The goal of science is to develop a sense of curiosity and understanding about the world in our everyday lives.” In this poster, we will also discuss potential competing purposes of goals of science literacy such as "developing a future STEM workforce that can compete internationally" vs. "developing students who can care for their world". We will describe how such tensions could be discussed within teacher education and professional development settings. We would like to talk to conference participants about if they feel such an instrument would be valuable and get feedback on the proposed process for developing the instrument.

Abd‐El‐Khalick, F., Boujaoude, S., Duschl, R., Lederman, N. G., Mamlok‐Naaman, R., Hofstein, A., ... & Tuan, H. L. (2004). Inquiry in science education: International perspectives. Science education, 88(3), 397-419.






Atkin, J. M., & Black, P. (2003). Inside science education reform: A history of curricular and policy change. Teachers College Press.








Belo, N.A.H., van Driel, J.H., van Veen, K. & Verloop, N. (2014). Beyond the dichotomy of teacher versus student-focused education: A survey study on physics teachers’ beliefs about the goals and pedagogy of physics education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 39, 89-101

DeBoer, G. E. (2000). Scientific literacy: Another look at its historical and contemporary meanings and its relationship to science education reform. Journal of research in science teaching, 37(6), 582-601.

National Research Council. (2012). A framework for K-12 science education: Practices, crosscutting concepts, and core ideas. National Academies Press.

Author

• Joel Donna, UW - River Falls