Journal of Baltic Science Education

146-155

Authors: Huseyin Akkus, Hakki Kadayifci, Basri Atasoy

The purpose of this study is to develop a two-tier multiple choice test to detect tenth grade high school students’ conceptual understanding related to chemical equilibrium. In the development of the test the steps described by Treagust (1988) were used. The test was prepared for the purpose of detecting students’ conceptual understanding in topics like approach to equilibrium, equilibrium state, changes in the equilibrium conditions, addition of inert gas and catalyst. The test was administered to 102 tenth grade students. The internal validity coefficient of Cronbach alpha was 0.903. Difficulty indices ranged from 0.20 to 0.93, and discrimination indices ranged from 0.19 to 0.89. Each item was analyzed to determine student understanding and identify alternative conceptions about, chemical equilibrium concept. Results of the test suggested students did not acquire a satisfactory understanding of chemical equilibrium concepts and 25 common students’ alternative conceptions were identified through analysis of test items.

168-182

Authors: Evangelos Manolas, Walter Leal Filho

Misconceptions may be characterized as wrong or inaccurate views of a particular issue which, due to lack of clarity, are seen or perceived wrongly. Students hold misconceptions about many issues and subjects, including in respect of climate change. Most alarming about misconceptions is that if people continue to build knowledge on such misunderstandings, this may have serious impacts on their learning. Following a brief literature review on cooperative learning, this paper adopts a research methodology which a) defines what a misconception is, b) lists possible sources of misconceptions, c) discusses five misconceptions students often have about climate change and d) puts forward some cooperative learning techniques teachers can use to handle the problem.

195-208

Authors: Vincentas Lamanauskas, Dalia Augiene

Human progress is inseparable from scientific achievements. The role of scientific achievements and knowledge in the modern world progress process is evident. Science can help the humanity a lot: create a more comfortable life, predict natural phenomena, foster humanistic traditions, educate society, change the development of society and so on. Today it is obvious, that the basis of country’s prosperity is its members’ perceptiveness, ability to discover, research and create. Therefore, society, its education system is concerned with forming conditions, encouraging young generation to try their abilities in scientific research activity, develop necessary competences and to know scientist’s, researcher’s activity and career peculiarities already in a secondary school. After carrying out the research, the opinions of upper secondary school students (9-12 forms) about scientific research activity at school were analysed, Lithuanian comprehensive school upper secondary school students’ attitude towards researcher, scientist’s activity was revealed. Factor analysis was carried out applying the main component method and Varimax rotation with Kaiser Normalization. After carrying out this analysis it became clear that upper secondary school students do not relate their future with scientific research activity, researcher’s career is considered to be not perspective and of low prestige.

73-86

Authors: Yilmaz Kara, Salih Cepni

This study presents findings collected from an analysis of Turkish Biology Curriculum Guidelines and of their alignment with the curricular outcomes and the Student Selection Examination (SSE) for higher education. The analysis was performed in multiple dimensions: content areas, learning outcomes in terms of scientific research and process skills (SRPS), science-technology-society-environment (STSE), communication competencies, attitudes and values (CCAV) and cognitive objectives. Webb’s (2007) alignment criteria were used to investigate the relationship between curriculum standards and assessment frameworks. In this process, the biology questions asked in the 2010 SSE were examined in detail by 10 biology teachers who have been teaching biology courses at secondary schools. Although alignment consistency was high according to the depth-of-knowledge (DOK) consistency and categorical concurrence criteria, the SSE questions and curriculum outcomes were not fully aligned considering the low consistency of range of knowledge and balance of representation criteria.

98-113

Authors: Andrej Šorgo, Slavko Kocijančič

Among Slovenian upper secondary school science teachers a study was conducted about the implementation of laboratory work in Science teaching. One of the specific goals was to acquire preliminary data about the status of laboratory exercises in teaching Biology, Chemistry and Physics. Answers were received from 64 Biology teachers, 64 Chemistry teachers and 63 Physics teachers (about 40% of Slovene secondary school Science teachers). The differences in attitudes towards and performance of laboratory work among teachers of different Science subjects are small. It can be concluded that teachers of all three subjects have generally positive attitudes towards laboratory work. The differences occur in the way laboratory work is performed. Not so positive are the findings that many of the exercises are presented to the students as demonstrations, and an expository style is preferred. In the future, efforts should be made to transform expository labs into inquiry- and problem-based laboratory work.

127-137

Authors: Anne Laius, Miia Rannikmäe

This study examines the impact on 9th grade students’ change in socio-scientific reasoning and scientific creativity skills as a result of their science teachers’ professional change, as a result of participating in longitudinal in-service courses. Eight chemistry and four biology teachers participated in two consecutive intervention studies, each running for 8 months, both designed to guide teachers on promoting the level of scientific literacy in their students. During the in-service courses, the teachers created teaching materials for 4 integrative teaching modules and taught their students using a designed STL teaching approach. The students’ development was determined in terms of scientific creativity and socio-scientific reasoning skills, as indicators of scientific literacy gains, with an initial pre-test in the fall of the school year and a post-test in the spring after the STL intervention. The results of the study revealed that the degree of teachers’ professional level in promoting problem solving and decision making teaching and its impact on student gains, as well as the number of teachers collaborating together in the teaching within a school, had a significant impact on their students’ improvement in skills associated with socio-scientific reasoning and scientific creativity.

6-16

Authors: Vlasta Hus, Metka Kordigel Aberšek

In this article are presented the results of an empirical study, which tried to find the explanation for the relatively unsatisfactory results of Slovene pupils in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science study (TIMSS) in the area of early natural science. Questions from teachers and those from children in the process of teaching the school subject of Environmental Studies in the first grade of nine-year primary school were examined and also the communication that the teacher, as a mediator of a learning process, initiates with children. More precisely: the quantity and quality of teachers’, and consequently also of children’s questions. 18 teaching hours in two elementary schools were observed and recorded with the defined protocol during the teaching of three thematic topics. The results show that teachers ask too many questions and that those questions are at lower taxonomic levels. The research also showed that children seldom ask questions and that these are also generally at lower taxonomic levels. These types of questions cannot be used as a mediation tool and consequently do not stimulate the cognitive processes of pupils.

27-35

Authors: Fredrik Jeppsson, Jesper Haglund, Helge Strömdahl

The words disorder, information, freedom and spreading are used as metaphors and analogies in science teaching to capture the scientific qualitative sense of entropy. In addition, the identification of entropy with the everyday conception of heat has been proposed. While physical sciences are regarded as exact disciplines, in which terms have precise definitions, the words being used in the qualitative interpretation of entropy have many senses. This may provide an obstacle to achieving a scientific understanding of entropy. In this study, the metaphors for entropy and seeing entropy as heat were analysed by use of the different entries for the words in a dictionary. The present paper is a contribution to highlighting the importance of making any metaphors and analogies and their benefits and limitations explicit.

53-64

Authors: Andrej Šorgo, Jana Ambrožič Dolinšek, Iztok Tomažič, Franc Janžekovič

Active student-centered instructional methods bring more emotion into science teaching, especially in the case of socioscientific issues, like research on and usage of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). We tested the strength of ten basic emotions (fear, anger, joy, disgust, sadness, shame, contempt, guilt, surprise and interest) toward different GMOs. Students expressed high levels of interest, surprise and joy towards GMOs, emotions that could be used as possible motivators to raise the level of interest in Science. Students do not express an equal level of negative emotions toward GMOs as a general category, but take a standpoint towards each item or practice separately. Knowing this, the teacher can choose list of GMOs ranked from more acceptable to the least acceptable GMOs, to avoid any obstruction of reasoning toward GMOs based on strong negative emotions.

264-272

Authors: Maris Klavins, Madara Pelnena

This article identifies general trends in implementation of education for sustainable development into higher education in Latvia. The purpose of this study is to explore to what extent and by means of which approach the higher education institutions in Latvia have been attempting to incorporate sustainability in the curricula. The questioning on 8 higher education institutions was conducted and the current initiatives of practices were assessed. The study results show that higher education institutions are at the first stage of transforming their curricula towards education for sustainable development, and the efforts to incorporate the issues of sustainability into the curricula can rather be characterised as education about sustainable development. Major emphasis is put on the links between environmental education and education for sustainable development.

285-301

Authors: Michael Littledyke, Evangelos Manolas

The Brundtland Report (Brundtland Report, cited in United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 1999) definition of education for sustainability (EfS) allows us to conceptualise sustainability in a number of ways in education, such as ecological sustainability, sociocultural sustainability and, political sustainability. Whilst EfS issues have multi-dimensional meanings, including effects, root causes, change strategies and preferred futures each curriculum area can contribute. This paper focusses on how approaches to science education can contribute to or inhibit EfS, according to what degree it informs understanding of sustainability issues, how it may support values and beliefs underpinning sustainability and how priorities in constructing curricula can influence pedagogy. Epistemology, as conceptions of knowledge associated with science, and ideology, as political influences that shape curricula, can direct approaches to pedagogy, which may or may not support EfS. Examples of approaches to science education that may support EfS are discussed with implications for appropriate pedagogy to support EfS summarised.

315-323

Authors: Paul Pace

The paper will comparatively highlight the main characteristics of environmental education and some of its variants. Similarly the paper will critically analyse major international events addressing the need to implement environmental education and their impact on the educational community. These two reviews will act as a backdrop to a critical analysis of why the resources invested in environmental education have not provided the turnout expected. Strategies adopted to get results have further complicated the situation, giving rise to confusion and lack of direction in the field, a schism between theory and practice, and a further fragmentation of resources. The paper concludes by making several reflections and concrete proposals about making the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development a worthwhile experience … particularly at the grassroots level.

167-178

Authors: Olavi Hakkarainen, Maija Ahtee

The aim of this study is to find out how pupils will connect their observations and explanations from a demonstration. Seventh graders (117) were shown successively two demonstrations about floating and sinking. Pupils’ observations and explanations were classified and compared with each other in the two demonstrations. The four observation categories were: Complete observation, incomplete observation, non-essential observation, and no observation. The five explanation categories were: Scientific explanation (density), alternative explanation (weight), situational explanation (temperature), spontaneous explanation (irrelevant, insufficient, wrong), and no explanation. Both the observations and the explanations were improved significantly in the second demonstration even that no teaching was done between the demonstrations. The ways used by the seventh graders in processing their observations and explanations have been examined from the viewpoint of perceptual learning, variation theory, and the memory models in cognitive psychology.

187-195

Authors: Frackson Mumba, William F. Mejia, Vivien Mweene Chabalengula, Simeon Mbewe

This study determined the nature of the laboratory activities undertaken by Resident Scientists in high schools through a science education outreach project. This study also attempted to determine Resident Scientists’ perceived benefits and difficulties of students doing inquiry science activities in schools. A sample comprised eight Resident Scientists at a medium-sized University in Midwest of the USA. Resident Scientists were serving in a University-School partnership project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) GK-12 program. Data was collected through a questionnaire. Results show that the reported laboratory activities were at guided and verification inquiry levels and nothing at structured and open inquiry levels. Resident Scientists recognized the important role of inquiry, benefits and difficulties for implementing inquiry in schools. Their perceived difficulties for inquiry in schools represent barriers for open inquiry in science classrooms. These findings have some implications for science learning, teaching and teacher education.

212-223

Authors: Sari Havu-Nuutinen, Tuula Keinonen

This paper explores the changes in 12 year old pupils’ conceptions of the organs and systems of the human body. The research was conducted as an intervention study in one Finnish primary school. The instruction was carried out by using the STS teaching approach which aims at linking the studying contents to everyday life contexts. The drawing method was used to catch pupils’ conceptions of organs and parts of the body, before and after the teaching period. In addition, nine pupils were interviewed. Results indicate that before teaching, pupils were able to name several organs of the human body, but they had no understanding of how they function and what is their relation with each other. After the teaching period the pupils were able to name more of the organs and explain more clearly their function and meaning. In particular, the brain and digestive systems were understood more accurately.

237-254

Authors: Gul Unal Coban

Scientific understanding is important to science teachers. The way which science teachers use for explaining issues related to science also affects students’ understanding of science. Therefore, as a measure of the prospective science teachers’ understanding of science, their conceptions and descriptions on scientific issues compose the aim of this study. The views of 75 prospective science teachers who are selected by purposive sampling were probed about the meaning of scientific and being scientific, the scientific events, the scientific questions and the scientific knowledge through open ended questions. The results, which are based on significantly different categories, displayed that the prospective science teachers’ understanding of scientific issues is generally based on the phenomenon and empirical based understanding and perceived features those address traditional view of science. Besides, they seem to have inadequate understanding of science regarding logical, relational, sociological and historical aspects. At the end some recommendations were proposed accordingly.