Knowledge about students' conceptions is one of the requisite components of pedagogical content knowledge. A keen awareness of students' alternative conceptions provides teachers with information about prospective difficulties students may incur as they make attempts to learn more accurate scientific representations of critical concepts. In this study, we investigated elementary school teachers' understanding of their students' alternative conceptions about change of states and dissolution. The subjects were 152 elementary school teachers and 529 sixth graders in Korea. A conceptions test and the test of the understanding about students' conceptions were administered in order to examine students' alternative conceptions and the teachers' awareness of their students' alternative conceptions, respectively. The effects of teachers' characteristics such as teaching experience, highest academic degree, science teaching efficacy, and views about teaching and learning (i.e., constructivist
In this study, we investigated the characteristics of lesson planning of pre-service secondary science teachers and the factors which influenced in their lesson planning. Thirteen pre-service secondary science teachers at a college of education in Seoul participated in this study. Teaching-learning materials such as lesson plans and handouts, and lesson planning journals written by the pre-service teachers were collected. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted to obtain information about their lesson planning activities. The analyses of the results revealed that most of the pre-service teachers did not systematically consider the national science curriculum and focused on planning one lesson only. Instructional objectives were not only considered as minor element in lesson planning, but also limited to cognitive domain. Devising teaching-learning strategies was found to be the starting point of the lesson planning. They accommodated constructivistic teaching-learning theory presented in their method courses through reflective evaluation of the experiences of learning in their secondary schools. The experiment activities that were presented in the textbooks were used themselves when they planned experiments as student activities, but other activities were planned depending on their personal experiences. Most pre-service teachers did not plan assessment because they could not recognize it as an element of lesson planning. These results may offer some implications in educating pre-service secondary science teachers on lesson planning.
In this study, we investigated preservice secondary science teachers' uses of curriculum materials in curriculum design through a case study. Two preservice science teachers at a college of education in Seoul participated in this study. We interviewed them about their beliefs on teaching and learning prior to their teaching students. We then observed their teaching and collected all of the teaching/learning materials. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted before and after the instructions. Their uses of curriculum materials were systematically analyzed in the aspects of reading, evaluating and adapting curriculum materials. The analyses of the results revealed that their uses of curriculum materials had a significant difference in curriculum design. There was a difference in the way of reading curriculum materials that derived from different perspectives of curriculum reconstruction. The perspectives of curriculum reconstruction also affected the way of adapting curriculum materials. While the 'adding' was an important adaptation in curriculum design with active perspectives, the 'changing' was an important one with passive perspectives. In addition, the degrees of evaluating curriculum materials from the learners' views depended on their beliefs on teaching and learning. It was also connected to qualitative differences of adaptation in 'increasing student control over an activity' and 'increasing teacher control over an activity'. Educational implications of these findings are discussed.
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