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In a climate of continuing change, the continuing professional development of science teachers is an important issue, but one which is subject to resource constraints. It is vital that professional development is as effective as possible. This paper describes an attempt to examine the outcomes of such activities and to try to apply an existing categorisation system for framing these outcomes in terms of their impact at different levels on pupils, teachers, and schools. Data come from a number of large professional development projects for teachers in primary schools, the projects were funded by an independent educational charitable trust over a period of six years. Analysis of the data confirms that many of the categories proposed in the early 1990s are still applicable today but that new ones are needed to extend the framework, perhaps to reflect a changed context for science in primary schools. An attempt is made to show the relationship between categories identified.

Ten high-school chemistry teachers and two staff members from the Science Teaching Department of the Weizmann Institute of Science who served as coordinators participated in a one-year professional development program aimed at enhancing the teaching and learning of chemistry using Action Research methodology. In Action Research, teachers research their own practice of teaching. The program involved monthly meetings throughout the year at the Science Teaching Department. Here we present two case studies which will serve as examples of the program. In the first study, teachers investigated their students’ misconceptions about the electrical conductivity of metals and ionic materials. The second study focused on the behavior of non-science-oriented students and their attitudes toward chemistry studies. The program included an evaluation of the process that teachers underwent while doing their classroom research; the evaluation was done by the workshop coordinators. Based on the findings of these two studies, we may conclude that involving teachers in an intensive workshop dealing with various aspects of teaching and with investigating their own work, provides teachers with tools for systematically diagnosing students’ learning difficulties and the ability to change their instruction accordingly. Moreover, the workshop experience supported an environment of collegiality and enabled teachers to collaborate with professional researchers and other teachers.

Teachers’ confidence and attitudes towards science teaching and science understanding were tested before and after a major in-service programme in 31 schools. The 70 teachers’ attitudes were assessed using a 49-item Likert-scale test. Science understanding was measured by multi-choice and open-ended questions. Data on pupils’ attitudes and cognition was also collected. After in-service, overall teachers’ initial confidence about science teaching had improved significantly. The majority of teachers, but not all, had developed satisfactory levels of understanding and more positive attitudes. Teachers responded to the in-service programme in different ways. Four teacher types were identified: high attainers who improved attitudes and confidence; teachers with limited science knowledge who found the course difficult but made improvements; unaffected professionals who were already working well and for whom the course had little effect; and disaffected teachers who showed low levels of confidence and competence throughout. Pupil cognition and attitudinal differences related to these types were found.

This paper focuses on the professional development of school chemistry teachers in the context of curriculum reform in The Netherlands. An important aim of this reform is the implementation of teaching chemistry concepts in contexts, which requires substantial changes in current teaching practice. The aim of our research was to develop an empirically validated course design and design principles for courses, on teaching concepts in contexts. A developmental research approach was used with several cycles of an in-depth case study. We describe the design and evaluation results of the first and second cycles. The conclusions are formulated as design principles for a third cycle of this type of teacher in-service course.

The purpose of this case study was to evaluate the changes in opinion of a group of future teachers on the danger of mobile telephones. The opinions were determined before and after epistemological work and role-playing in a form of a legal suit. This activity was part of pre-service teachers’ initial training in a one-week module dedicated to prepare them to lead debates on controversial scientific issues. The fifteen participants were future physical science and biology teachers. A comparison of pre- and post-test evaluations revealed that these pre-service teachers were less sure of the risk involved in using mobile telephones following the activity and that the role-playing affected their epistemological interpretation of the research results.

What can contribute to the ‘value’ of a piece of research about an innovative teaching-learning sequence from a research point of view and a teacher’s point of view? We will try to demonstrate that such values from these two perspectives are different, but not contradictory, and that they can be sought in the same research work. Two aspects will be developed and illustrated.

The first aspect is about ‘’ justification. We will propose a general framework which can help to make the principles underlying the design of a sequence clear, and so situate various teaching-learning sequences concerning the same domain of knowledge. Such a framework can be useful both for researchers to make their choices and hypotheses more explicit and for teachers to select one approach over another.

The second aspect is about ‘a posteriori’ or ‘empirical’ validation. Referring to various pieces of research work, we will discuss the limits of usual ‘comparative’ approaches and will focus on more ‘internal’, ‘descriptive’ approaches. We will argue that describing cognitive pathways of learners through teaching-learning situations constitutes a fruitful tool, both for researchers to validate some of the choices or hypotheses underlying the design of the learning situations and for teachers to feel more comfortable with such innovative teaching-learning sequences.

This paper reports a study designed to provide evidence about the feasibility of designing short teaching sequences, based on insights from research and scholarship on teaching and learning science, which are measurably better at promoting conceptual understanding amongst students than the teaching approaches usually used by their schools. The research team worked in collaboration with a group of 9 teachers (3 biology, 3 chemistry, 3 physics) to design, implement, and evaluate 3 teaching sequences for use with students aged 11–15. The physics and biology teaching sequences were also implemented by other teachers (11 and 5 respectively) not involved in their design. Teachers implemented the physics and biology teaching sequences in ways broadly consistent with the planned approach. In all cases where a valid comparison can be made, students’ responses to diagnostic questions requiring the use of conceptual models to construct explanations were significantly better following the designed teaching sequences, than the responses of comparable students following the school’s usual teaching approach. The significance of these findings for research in science education, and for policy and practice relating to science teaching, are discussed.

A research programme for the improvement of science teaching is described, exemplified, and discussed. Briefly, the idea of the programme is that researchers in science education and teachers in schools should work together to design teaching sequences and to assess how they function in practice. Research results concerning pupils’ everyday conceptions, as well as analyses of the conceptual structure of a given area and the reasons for teaching it, play an important role when working on a design. The most important product of the design phase is a detailed guide for teachers, which we look upon as a tool for further knowledge-building. In our paper we suggest that the idea of domain-specific theories is worth examining and developing. It might contribute to strengthening science education as an autonomous discipline.

In this paper we describe an instructional model for the acquisition of high order learning skills (HOLS) and the program “Scientific Communication”, which supports its application in a junior high school (JHS) science and technology curriculum. The model emphasizes explicit and spiral instruction of learning skills, and a continuous demand for their implementation in various contexts and tasks. We describe a study that assessed the impact of our instructional model on students’ performances. Students (N=447) from five different JHSs participated in the study: One group (N=334) studied the program “Scientific Communication”, and the other (N=113) did not study learning skills through any formal program. The results show superior performance of the first group over the second in the following ways: the ability to describe and explicate the practice of learning skills; three aspects of the actual performances of a complex task: knowledge, learning skills, and the quality of products; and reports by students on the skills that they had acquired. The results also indicate that high and average achieving students gained the most from the program. We concluded that the contribution of the program “Scientific Communication” to students’ performances of learning skills indicates the potential of its underlying instructional model in achieving its goals.

This paper reports a small-scale curriculum project aimed at teaching about the nature of science at lower secondary school. The main idea of this project is to stimulate students’ learning of science as a process by involving the students in reflections based on personal experience of an open-ended investigation. The paper describes how it is possible to include publication and argumentation of methods and results in a school experiment, as well as findings related to changes in students’ epistemological thinking. The students wrote about how researchers conduct research prior to and after the project. Analysis of these texts showed that more students included the idea of testing hypotheses in the post-study texts than in the pre-study texts. Students also expressed more awareness of what researchers might do to enhance the quality of their research. We found that students tended to use words like “facts” and “proofs” in the prestudy texts. In the post-study texts, however, more students emphasised that research findings do not represent final answers but the researcher’s argument-based conclusions.