An element of current reform in science education worldwide is the shift from the dominant traditional algorithmic lower-order cognitive skills (LOCS) teaching, to the higher-order cognitive skills (HOCS)-promoting learning; that is, the development of students' capabilities including those of question asking (QA), critical/system thinking (CST), decision making (DM), problem solving (PS), conceptualisation of fundamental concepts (CFC) and the transfer of these within both the science disciplines and real life interdisciplinary situations. Accordingly, an innovative metacognitionpromoting science teacher professional development course, integrating formal and informal science education, was developed and implemented within a traditional model, focusing on the HOCS skills of QA, PS, and CFC. The HOCS promoting teaching and assessment strategies of this course not only enabled participants to reflect on their own learning, but also facilitated their self-reflective assessment, utilising a pre-post designed research-based methodology. The results suggest that such, or similarly appropriate, metacognition-oriented courses can contribute positively to the development of science teachers' HOCS capability.
We engage in a metalogue based on eight papers in this issue of Cultural Studies of Science Education that review the state of conceptual change research and its possible affect on the teaching and learning of science. Our discussion addresses three aspects of conceptual change research: theoretical, methodological, and practical, as we discuss conceptual change research in light of our experiences as science educators. Finally, we examine the implications of conceptual change research for the teachers and students with whom we work.
On metalogueWe are science education researchers that work with graduate and undergraduate students learning to be teachers. We share an interest in praxis, which emerges from a dialectical relationship between our participation in culture from being in the world and the meaning we ascribe to that being. We came together to communicate our sense of the arguments of two focus papers on conceptual change. A concurrent goal was to identify how six responding authors, three for each focus paper, exercised radical doubt that enriched our understanding of the arguments in the focus papers and how our experience as science educators informed our responses to the eight papers. Collectively, we asked whether conceptual change research could inform the teaching and learning of science. We agreed that our collective reflections on these papers could be best presented as a metalogue. Building from the work of Roth and Tobin (2004), we take a metalogue to be a text that allows each of us to preserve our voices and to achieve a transition from our experience to theory about experience filtered by conceptual change theory.
This chapter explores how learning in cities can promote environmental literacy, raise awareness about local environmental problems, and engage students in discussions of sustainable choices. City as Classroom is a trend in urban environmental education that encompasses nature study, citizen science, inquiry-based learning, and neighborhood inventories. It draws from place-based education, which enables teachers to use the varied resources of a city to engage students in authentic experiences and learning in the places where they live. Using examples from Greece and the United States, this chapter considers the ways in which place matters and shapes what we teach and how we teach. It shows that cities can function as vibrant outdoor classrooms, with the goal to help teachers and other educators develop curriculum that is inquiry-based and fosters the development of problem-solving skills as well as an environmental stewardship ethic.
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