Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 8, Issue 2, Article 2 (Dec., 2007) Behiye AKCAY Effectiveness of professional development program on a teacher’s learning to teach Science as inquiry Previous Contents Next

METHODOLOGY

Subject

Participant in this project were drawn from the Area Education Agency 267 (AEA 267) in north-central Iowa.

At the beginning, the Constructivist Learning Environment Survey Teacher form (CLES-T) (Fraser & Taylor, 1990) was given to the teachers to find out their beliefs concerning constructivist teaching science in the classroom. This study focuses on one teacher, Ms. Smith, for the following reasons:

• She had the lowest score on the CLES-T (Fraser & Taylor, 1990)pretest.
• During the interview with the workshop leader, she was the only teacher who accepted her weak background initially concerning teaching inquiry in pre-workshop interviews.
• On her written reflections, she explained her frustrations concerning use of inquiry methods and her own more traditional teaching experiences more openly than did all the other teachers who attended the summer workshop.

Ms. Smith had 11 years of teaching experience at the same middle school. She stated that she loved teaching, and was eager to improve her teaching practices. She was volunteered to join the ICPDP because she wished to learn how to use inquiry effectively in the classroom. She was enthusiastic and eager to change her science teaching and strategies. She was willing to share her teaching performances via video recordings with the other participants.

Data Collection

Five types of data were used to analyze Ms. Smith’s teaching practices:

1. The Classroom Learning Environment Survey (CLES): CLES has two versions. The Constructivist Environment Surveys Teacher Form (CLES-T) (Fraser & Taylor, 1990) and the Constructivist Learning Environment Survey Student Form (CLES-S) (Aldridge, Fraser, & Taylor, 2000) were used to assess teacher’s and students’ perceptions of constructivist teaching practices occurred in the classroom.

Both the CLES-T and CLES-S consists of 42 statements about the classroom-learning environment. A five-point Likert-type scale is used to determine perceptions of a five features of constructivist classroom: Personal Relevance (PR), Scientific Uncertainty (SU), Critical Voice (CV), Shared Control (SC), and Student Negotiation (SN) (Table 4).

Table 4: Subcategories of CLES

CLES Subcategories	Example Questions from the CLES
Personal Relevance: Relevance of learning to students' lives	(1) Students learn about the world outside of school.
Critical Voice: Legitimacy of expressing a critical opinion.	(3) It's OK for students to ask "why do we have to learn this?"
Shared Control: Participation in planning, conduct and assessment of learning.	(4) Students help me to plan what they are going to learn
Uncertainty: Provisional status of scientific knowledge.	(8) Students learn that the views of science have changed over time.
Student Negotiation: Involvement with other students in assessing viability of new ideas.	(23) Students ask each other to explain their ideas

CLES-T was completed to day one of the summer workshop and after implementation of the spring short course based on her perceptions of her teaching in terms of constructivist teaching practices whereas CLES-S was completed after implementation of the spring short course based on students’ perceptions of their teacher’ (Mrs. Smith) constructivist teaching practices. The reliability of CLES-T (Abd Hamid, 2006) and CLES-S (Taylor et al., 1994) showed in Table 5.

Table 5: Reliability of CLES-T and CLES-S Subcategories

Subscales of CLES	CLES-TAlpha Reliability (N=31) (Abd Hamid, 2006).	CLES-SAlpha Reliability (N=34)(Taylor at al., 1994)
Personal Relevance (PR)	0.70	0.81
Scientific Uncertainty (SU)	0.56	0.54
Critical Voice (CV)	0.76	0.79
Shared Control (SC)	0.90	0.85
Student Negotiation (SN)	0.71	0.68

2. Philosophy of Teaching and Learning (PTL) (Lew, 2001): The instrument consists of eight open-ended questions and provides evidence of what teachers believe about their teaching and learning philosophy. Data were obtained from day one of the summer workshop and after implementation of the spring short course. It has three subcategories: (1) what students should be doing in class, (2) what teachers should be doing in class, (3) the teacher understanding of process and content.

3. Written Reflections: These data were collected from Ms. Smith’s class journals entries collected over a seven days period through short courses during the 2003-2004 academic year. In these entries, she evaluated her own beliefs concerning teaching and learning after every class period. Additionally, she recorded the problems she faced during her move to more inquiry teaching.

4. Videos: The goal was to find the teacher’s constructivist behaviors using video-tapes of her classroom performance. Two videotapes were collected during the study. First one was after implementation of the fall shout course and the second one after implementation of the spring shout course. The videos were used to assess the level of constructivist practices implemented during the lesson in different categories of teacher’s attempts to: (1) share responsibility of learning with students, (2) engage students in activities and experiences, (3) focus on activities relating to student understanding of concepts, (4) adapt her teaching activities based on students’ level of understanding, (5) teach higher order thinking skills, (6) integrate content and process skills, (7) facilitate students connecting major concepts, (8) demonstrate interpersonal relations with her students, (9) use examples, and (10) integrate concepts and skills.

5. Expert Science Teaching Educational Evaluation Model (ESTEEM) (Burry-Stock, 1995). ESTEEM was used to assess the actual classroom practices of the participants from the videotapes. The reliability of the ESTEEM is r (14) = .37 (Campbell, 2004). The ESTEEM consists of four subcategories: (1) facilitating the learning process from a constructivist perspective, (2) content specific pedagogy (Pedagogy related to students understanding), (3) contextual knowledge (Adjustments in strategies based on interactions with the students), and (4) content knowledge (Teacher knowledge of subject matter). It is based on five point Likert type scale, five being highest level and the one is the lowest level (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986). These categories were as follows: (1) novice, (2) advanced beginner, (3) competent, (4) proficient, and (5) expert (Table 6) (Berliner, D.C., 1988).

Table 6: The Stages of Teacher Practicing Constructivist Teaching

Stage 1. Novice: The elements of the tasks to be performed need to be labeled and learned, and one learns a set of context-free rules to guide behavior…The behavior of the novice is rational, relatively inflexible, and tends to conform to whatever rules and procedures and they were told to follow. Stage 2. Advanced Beginner: Here experiences can become melded with verbal knowledge, similarities across context are recognized, and episode knowledge is built…The novice and beginner, though intensely involved in the learning process, may also lack a certain responsibility for their actions. This occurs because they are following rules,…but not actively determining through personal action what is happening. Stage 3. Competent: Competent performers of a skill have two distinguishing characteristics. First they make conscious choices about what they are going to do. They set priorities and decide on plans. They have rational goals and choose reasonable means for reaching them. In addition, while enacting their skill, they can determine what is and what is not important. From their experience they know what to attend to and what to ignore … teachers at this stage begin to feel responsible for what happens….However competent performers are not yet fast, fluid, or flexible in their behavior. Stage 4. Proficient: This is the stage at which intuition or know-how becomes prominent. Nothing mysterious is meant in these terms…At some point in learning to ride a bike you no longer think about it…..From the wealth of experience that the proficient individual has accumulated comes a holistic recognition of similarities…which allows proficient individuals to predict events more precisely…The proficient performer, however, while intuitive in pattern recognition and in ways of knowing, is still analytical and deliberate in deciding what to do. Stage 5. Expert: If novices, advanced beginners, and competent performers are rational, and proficient performers are intuitive, we might categorize experts as “arational”. They have an intuitive grasp of situations and seem to sense in non-analytic, non-deliberate ways the appropriate response to make. They show fluid performance, as we all do when we no longer have to choose our words when speaking or think about where to place our feet when walking…They are not consciously choosing what to attend to and what to do. They are acting effortlessly and fluidity, behaving in ways that are not easily described as deductive or analytical … the behavior of the expert is certainly not irrational.

Data Analysis

This study employed qualitative and quantitative methods to obtain data for respond to the research question. The qualitative data were gathered from the teacher’s written reflections and her responses on the PTL survey. These data were used to assess Ms. Smith’s own ideas about inquiry teaching. Quantitative data were obtained from two videotapes, the CLES-S and CLES-T surveys.