 |
Asia-Pacific Forum
on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 14, Issue 2, Article 8 (Dec., 2013) |
Twenty-four science teacher educators participated in the study. They were from the most economically developed regions in China, including Shanghai, Beijing, and cities in provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Guangdong, whose education were also relatively more developed due to their richer funding and human resources. Since in Mainland China, the contact information of the university teachers is rather private and cannot be found through public resources, the snowballing strategy was the major sampling strategy adopted in the present study. The authors first contacted some Chinese science educators that they knew in person and invited them to participate in the study. Upon completion of the interviews, each of the participants was asked to introduce other educators to us as potential participants of the study. Such snowballing process carried on throughout the whole process of data collection. Twenty-four educators participated in the study. These participants include considerable variations in their age, science subject of their prospective science teachers, teaching experience, and academic position as indicated in Table 2.
Table 2. An overview of the background of participating Chinese science teacher educators
Age
Gender
Science subject of their students
Academic position
Year of training science teachers
>50
40-50
30-40
M
F
Phys.
Chem.
Bio.
Int. sci.
Prof.
Associate Prof.
Instr.*
>20
10-20
5-10
9
11
4
15
9
7
7
5
5
7
13
4
10
9
5
* In China, instructor is the lowest title in academic positions.
Two semi-structured interviews were conducted with each educator. The first one was a general interview (GI). An open-ended question is used to probe their conception of teaching NOS: how do you teach NOS to your prospective science teachers in your own course(s) and why? When raising this question, the informants were asked to try to locate the discussion of teaching NOS within the real context of their own courses of teaching prospective science teachers. The interview time of each informant ranges from 45 to 100 minutes.
The second semi-structured interview (SI) is a scenario-based interview, during which the science educators were provided with five examples of NOS teaching designs (one example is attached in the Appendix), which were designed on the basis of activities reported in literature on teaching NOS to science teachers (Abd-El-Khalick & Akerson, 2004; Abell, 2001; Lin & Chen, 2002; McComas, 1998; Nott & Wellington, 1998). After careful reading of the five NOS instructional designs (one example is attached in the Appendix), the science educators were asked to give their personal comments on these designs and how they are similar to and/or different from how they teach NOS to their prospective science teachers in their own course(s). Similar to the general interview, it was emphasized that the informants need to try to compare these examples with their understanding of teaching NOS within the real context of their own courses of teaching prospective science teachers. This interview lasted for 40-120 minutes.
The explorative approach (Stake, 1995) was adopted to analyze the data collected in this study. The researchers followed three phrases for generating “grounded theory”, i.e. open coding, axial coding, and focused coding (Charmaz, 2000; Strauss & Corbin, 1990), to analyze the data. Regular meeting were held among the authors to discuss on the codes and themes identified in the data. In the end, five key dimensions were identified: (i) value of teaching NOS to prospective science teachers, (ii) NOS content to be taught to prospective science teachers, (iii) arrangement of NOS instruction in science teacher education courses, (iv) learning of NOS, and (v) role of the teacher in NOS teaching. This paper only focuses on reporting one dimension, i.e. NOS content to be taught to prospective science teachers. The specific NOS elements suggested by educators and their frequency can be found in Table 3.
