Teaching for scientific literacy: Bangladeshi teachers’ perspectives, practices and challenges

Research Design and Data Sources

In this paper, we report some data from a large-scale research, which adopted a qualitative-dominant design. The research first employed a questionnaire to gather responses from a number of teachers teaching the General Science course at the junior secondary education level in Bangladesh. The questionnaire data were used to select participants from different demographic contexts for the detailed qualitative part of this research. In the selection process, several demographic factors (e.g., teachers’ teaching experiences, school location, school type, class size and workload) were considered to ensure the “maximal variation”, which helped provide a good qualitative dataset (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2007, p. 112). In this manner, we selected six teachers as the participants for the case studies. The six teachers and their associated science classes (including students) were considered as six cases. The rationale for considering multiple cases is that individual cases would share some common and contrasting characteristics that would provide an in-depth understanding of the research problem (Stake, 2005, 2006; Yin, 2003). In this paper, we present data relating to three of these cases. A snapshot of these three teachers’ demographic information illustrated in Table 3 reveals that they represent a range of geographical locations (urban, semi-urban and rural), school types (co-ed and boys’) with different class sizes (from 50 to 100 students) and workload (from 20 to 32 periods per week).

Table 3. Demographics of the Participant Teachers

Criteria	Sabina^# (F)	Alam (M)	Bibhash (M)
School location	Semi-urban	Urban	Rural
School type	Co-ed	Co-ed	Boys’
Workload (periods/week)	29	20	32
Class size	53	50	100

^#All names are pseudonyms to protect the identity of the participants.

A number of data sources, for example, interviews, lesson observations and focus group interviews were used in this case study research. Initially, we conducted a pre-lesson semi-structured interview (Patton, 2002) with each participant teacher to explore his/her perspectives of scientific literacy and the values he/she considered pertinent to scientific literacy. The pre-lesson interview, in addition, allowed us and the teacher participants to get to know each other, to develop a notion of mutual trust and build rapport (Babbie, 2011) and to make practical arrangements for observing their lessons.

Then we acted as passive observers (Mertens, 1998) of a series of classroom lessons to understand how the teachers translated their perspectives into classroom teaching. Three lessons for each teacher (Sabina, Alam and Bibhash) were observed. In order to avoid any interruption to the usual school schedule we did not request that they teach any particular content/ unit, but we did observe all the lessons for the particular unit a teacher taught. A unit may have different emphases at different times in the progress of the topic, so observation of teaching the whole unit would help understand a teacher’s overall teaching approach. These observations provided rich examples of these teachers’ practice in action in the classroom and were an additional data source to their verbalised practices indicated in the pre-lesson interviews. Moreover, observation of teachers’ lessons helped us identify significant aspects of their teaching, which were worth further exploration during the post-lesson interview.

Each teacher was interviewed again at the end of the last observation (post-lesson interview) to gain further explanation of what happened in the classroom. These post-lesson interviews were also used to explore teachers’ views on the challenging issues they encountered in their teaching for scientific literacy.

As students are an integral part of a class, their views about their class experiences are worthwhile in understanding how particular issues happened in a science class. Six students from each of the teachers’ science classes comprised each of the three focus groups. The focus groups provided insights into the range of views or experiences (Morgan & Krueger, 1993) that students had about the ways science was taught in their class. In this research, focus group interviews were used as supporting data sources to understand teachers’ practices in the science classes.

Data Analysis

Digitally recorded interviews and focus groups were transcribed. The interview transcripts were sent back to the participant teachers to confirm the accuracy of the transcripts in order to enhance the credibility of data (Creswell, 2007). As reading qualitative data several times gives deeper understanding about the data (Creswell, 2008), the qualitative databases (interview transcripts, lesson observation reports and focus group interview transcripts) were read several times before assigning codes to them. Using NVivo (version 8) and following Miles and Huberman (1994), a list of codes or categories were identified in the transcripts as they emerged from the data. This approach allowed for the perspectives and practices of the respondents to be identified without applying preconceptions. As this research sought respondents’ perspectives and practices in the absence of a prior set of research findings from which a framework could have been constructed, it was reasonable to not impose a preconceived framework, which could impose excessive rigidity to the research.

Based on the analysis procedure as described above, detailed case reports for the participant teachers were then produced. These case reports were finally analysed applying a cross-case data analysis procedure (Stake, 2006) to understand the pattern of the themes that emerged from the cases. Concurring with Miles and Huberman (1994), it was perceived that cross-case analysis in this data analysis procedure helped achieve a deeper understanding of teacher’s perspectives of scientific literacy and its underpinning values, the translation of their perspectives into classroom teaching and the issues they perceive as challenging in their teaching.

For presenting results in the following section, references to the relevant data sources are made. For example, SI1 refers to the pre-lesson interview with Sabina; BI2 refers to the post-lesson interview with Bibhash; AFG refers to the focus group interview with Alam’s students, and SO1 refers to Sabina’s first lesson observation, SO2 refers to Sabina’s second lesson observation, and so on.