Early childhood pre-service teachers’ self-images of science teaching in constructivism science education courses

Early Childhood Science Education Courses

The classes in the study were titled “Early Childhood Science Education (ECSE)” in Korea and “Math, Science, Technology in Early Childhood Education (MST in ECE)” in the United States. Both classes were aimed at promoting constructivist views of science teaching. Moreover, both classes included learning about theories of constructivism and experiences as a constructivist learner as well as a teacher. Table 1 shows the main content and types of instructional activities in the two courses.

Table 1. Contents and types of instructional activities

Course Content		Types
ECSE	MST in ECE	ECSE	MST in ECE
1. Constructivism and constructivist science education		Lecture; Discussion; Journal writing	Discussion; Journal writing
Experiences with science and science education and attitudes toward these Perspectives on science and early childhood science education Children’s attitudes toward and concepts of science Contents and methods of early childhood science education Practice of science activities for young children	Constructivism, inquiry for science Perspectives on science and early childhood science education
2. Curriculum		Lecture; Discussion	Discussion
Scientific inquiry addressed in the Korean National Curriculum	National science curriculum standards and curriculum standards of the state of Illinois
3. Science activities for pre-service teachers		Discussion; Presentation; Journal writing	Discussion; Performance; Presentation; Journal writing
Selecting one subject per small group along with 4–5 sub-subjects Planning, performing, and analyzing the chosen lessons	Participation in science activities provided by the class instructor Technologies by the outside instructor Science activities prepared by groups of the pre-service teachers or individually
4. Planning, performing, and analyzing science activities for children		Discussion; Simulated instruction; Presentation; Journal writing	Discussion; Practice in the STEM class; Presentation; Journal writing
Analyzing examples of lessons performed in real classrooms (provided by an instructor) Planning, performance of small-group activities for early childhood science activities (in simulated situations)	Analysis of examples of lessons performed in real classrooms (provided by an instructor) Planning, performance of small-group activities for early childhood science activities (STEM classes)

ECSE. The course “Early Childhood Science Education (ECSE)” met for 16 weeks for three hours per week (see Table 1). The focus of this course was to promote pre-service teachers’ reflective thinking in various ways. First, the course included reviewing their own views of science teaching and eventually reestablishing constructivist perspectives. In doing so, the pre-service teachers kept journals about their views of science activities and learned about various examples of science activities based on constructivism. Second, the pre-service teachers conducted a team project of science throughout the semester. The teams were comprised of a group of five to six members, and the team planned a project to investigate a subject that they wanted to understand. Later, they performed an investigation and evaluated their own work with the class. They also made subject-based science lessons for young children in a simulated setting. They formed another small group, and they selected one lesson and performed it as a simulated lesson. In the simulated lesson, one group member pretended to be a teacher, and the other group members pretended to be children. For example, in a lesson about slope, they planned four activities: cars rolling on slopes with different variables of slopes and cars, slopes with different angles, slopes with different surface textures, and cars with various wheel sizes. The last plan was to roll on the actual slide that children play daily. The groups video-recorded the lessons of one of the activities and evaluated their own teaching. The video recordings and their reflections about the lesson performances were shared in the class.

MST in ECE. The course “Math, Science, Technology in Early Childhood Education (MST in ECE, shortly referred to as MST)” was taught 12 hours a week for five weeks, and students were scheduled for their last student-teaching practicum in March (see Table 1). The focus of this course was for the pre-service teachers to understand inquiry-based science/math activities in various ways. First, in order to address inquiry-based science activities for student-centered learning, the instructor brought science materials such as plants, insects, or tools to the class with which to conduct experiments. The pre-service teachers observed and performed the prepared experiments, and they shared the processes and results with the class. Second, the course provided various examples of science lessons. Teachers watched teaching videos of inquiry-based science activities for young children that the instructor selected, or they visited and observed actual kindergarten classrooms, providing inquiry-based science lessons by a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) program. They also discussed what they observed. Third, groups comprised of three to four students planned inquiry-based science activities. Specifically, they performed three science lessons in the STEM classrooms for kindergarteners and first graders: building bridges, rolling on a slope, and stacking up blocks. Each lesson was a one-time activity; likewise, the lessons were not related or extended to each other. After each lesson, they shared their experiences of teaching science to young children in the class.

Participants
The participants in this study included eight pre-service teachers who took early childhood science education courses during the spring semester of 2013. They were juniors or seniors with a major in early childhood education at four-year universities in Korea and the United States.

The participants were four seniors who took the MST course at a university located in mid-Eastern America during the spring semester of 2013. Five of 14 pre-service teachers volunteered to participate in the study, but one of them later withdrew. The four pre-service teachers (A1, A2, A3, and A4) ultimately participated in the study. The first author worked at this university as a visiting scholar from March 2012 to February 2013. The second author was a doctoral student who had supervised these students during their student-teaching practicums in the previous year, including junior practicum and senior student teaching. The participants took foundational college science courses such as biology or chemistry before enrolling in this course.

The participants included four juniors (K1, K2, K3, and K4) who took the ECSC course, and the first author was an instructor at a university located in the Chungnam, Korea during the spring semester of 2013. Thirty of them volunteered and participated in all data collection procedures. To compare and contrast, the researchers discussed and selected four students whose images displayed characteristics similar to those of the MST students (see questionnaires on images about science education in the Data Collection section of this paper). The pre-service teachers had experience observing in preschools but did not have student-teaching experience; instead, their experience consisted of teaching simulated lessons during their college courses. They did not take any college science courses prior to enrolling in this early childhood science education course.

Data Collection
The main data resources included DASTT-C (the Draw-a-Science-Teacher- Test Checklist, Thomas et al. 2001) questionnaires examining the influences on those images after taking the courses, conducting interviews, observing classes, and performing document collection. Pre-service early childhood teachers were asked to draw an image of themselves teaching a science activity as an early childhood teacher in the classroom and write brief answers to the following questions: What is the teacher doing and saying? What are the students doing and saying? Factors that influenced images of science teaching focused on the reasons for drawing a self-image of a specific science activity. The instrument included one question regarding reasons for drawing the image of a science activity. In MST, the first survey was distributed to the participants during the third week of January 2013; in ECSC, it was distributed during the first week of March 2013. The second survey examining images and influences after taking the respective course was completed in the United States during the third week of February 2013 and in ECSC during the third week of June 2013.

Interviews. Follow-up interviews were conducted to ask additional questions and clarify unclear answers that were found in the process of analyzing the drawings and written responses from the questionnaires, specifically about the roles of the teacher and children represented in the images of science teaching. The interview questions were typically stated as follows: “Please describe in detail what you drew…” or “You wrote _. Please tell us more specifically why you thought that.” Individual interviews were conducted face-to-face or by email, whichever was more convenient for a given participant. The interviews were conducted in the week following the completion of each survey. In MST, the first interviews before taking the course were conducted on January 4, 2013; in ECSC, they were conducted during the second week of March 2013. The second interviews after taking the course were performed in the United States during the fourth week of February 2013, and in ECSC, they were conducted during the third week of June 2013.

Observation. The first author observed the course in MST and took field notes in each class (12 hours per week). She was also the instructor for the course in ECSC. Moreover, she observed her own classroom while teaching her class and wrote reflective journal entries immediately after each class. The researcher focused on observing three aspects of the courses: (a) the nature of the course environment, (b) the contents and methods of each lesson, and (c) the roles of the pre-service teachers in the course. In all, the researcher collected 36 written research journals.

Document collection. The pre-service teachers in both settings created various documents as part of their class assignments. The researchers collected the copies of those documents which included their reflective journals and portfolios of the team project on science teaching. These documents helped the researchers better understand the pre-service teachers’ thoughts about their images of science teaching.

Data Analysis
To perform this analysis, the data from the DASTT-C and individual interviews were combined. The integrated data were coded according to the 13-point checklist (Thomas et al., 2001) in three areas: teacher (i.e., teacher’s activity and position), student (i.e., student’s activity and position), and environment (e.g., desk arrangement; lab organization; symbols of teaching, such as a blackboard; or symbols of science knowledge). Each of the 13 attributes was scored with a 1 or a 0, representing the presence or absence of the respective attribute. Total scores ranged from 0 to 13. The total scores between 0-4 indicated a fairly student-centered approach to teaching, and those scores between 7 and 13 suggested a fairly teacher-centered teaching approach. Meanwhile, for scores of 5 or 6, no decision could be concluded. Unclear information about the images was checked through interviews. The Crobach’ α between the researchers was 0.85 before the courses and 0.86 after the courses.

To discover the factors that influenced the self-images of science teaching after the courses concluded, the data from questionnaires about factors, individual interviews, observations, and documents that the participants completed were analyzed. The researchers first coded the data from the transcribed interviews and typed surveys about factors and established categories. Then, the codes from typed field notes were added to the previous coding sheet followed by the codes from other documents. By reading the coding sheet repeatedly, the researchers developed themes to tell the whole story of the study topic. To validate the analysis, the researchers did a member check with two early childhood education professors and the participants.