This article reports on a study conducted on Saudi middle school science teachers and students. The study implemented a 46-item Likert-scale questionnaire, aimed to investigate teachers' vs. students' positions and views in regards: smart devices use and access, the current use of social websites, the use of the web, views of the impact of social media on education, and views of possible impact of official use of social media on teaching and learning. From the basic characteristics of Saudi middle school teachers and students, it is apparently that smart phones are the best possible device to enhance the use of social media in education, where all teachers and almost 75% of students own it, and almost 85% of the students have Internet access at home vs. 95% of the teachers. In regards the social media applications, teachers and students use WhatsApp as a main tool, with 100% for the teachers, and almost 73% for the students. Both the teachers and the students are willing to use social media in education, and they believe it will enhance their educational experiences, but the practice is significantly low; in the meantime, there are agreements that the use of social media is for socialisation only. The infrastructure is available, but the comprehension educational view is absent, the researcher suggest that there is a need for training to evaluate own use of social media, and to enhance the abilities to use available properties.
Over the last decade, science education researchers in the US have studied students' beliefs about science and learning science and measured how these beliefs change in response to classroom instruction in science. In this paper, we present an Arabic version of the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) which was developed to measure students' beliefs about physics at King Saud University (KSU) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. We describe the translation process, which included review by four experts in physics and science education and ten student interviews to ensure that the statements remained valid after translation. We have administered the Arabic CLASS to over 300 students in introductory physics courses at KSU's men's and women's campuses. We present a summary of students' beliefs about physics at KSU and compare these results to similar students in the US.
The PhET Interactive Simulations Project recently partnered with the Excellence Center of Science and Mathematics Education at King Saud University with the joint goal of making simulations available worldwide. One of the main challenges of this partnership is to make PhET simulations easily translatable so that truly anyone with a computer can use them in their classroom. The PhET project team has created the Translation Utility that allows a person, who is fluent in both English and another language, to easily translate any of the PhET simulations. This can be done with minimal computer expertise, making the translation process accessible to faculty and teachers. In this presentation we will share solutions to many of the unexpected problems we encountered that would apply in general to on-line scientific course materials including working with a language that is written right-to-left, different character sets, possible misconceptions and various conventions for expressing equations, variables, units and scientific notation.
The researcher aims to investigate Saudi science teachers' beliefs about learning and teaching issues. The sample consisted of 247 middle school teachers in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The study conducted in the academic school year 2014/2015, and utilized a questionnaire and an interview that included 10% of the sample. The questionnaire targeted the teachers' conceptions of learning and teaching issues and examined whether these conceptions fit the transmission, or discovery, of constructivist approaches. The interview focused on "authentic scientific resources", the limitations of the word "science", and the possible conflict between science and Islamic resources. The goal of this study was to draw conclusions and pedagogical implications to contribute to a better understanding of science teachers' beliefs. The results show a significant shift toward the discovery approach. However, teachers address science as an issue separate from historical and cultural aspects. Based on the findings of this study, the researcher suggests a number of pedagogical implications.
This paper responds to the call for the need to develop professional development practices for leaders, supervisors, teachers, and student guidance within the framework of international standards, particularly in line with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s (KSA) vision 2030 (KSA, 2019). The current study aims to identify the obstacles and challenges for implementing sustainable professional development methods for teachers in KSA, who had participated in a ten-month Australian cross-national STEM professional development program. In addition, the teachers also participated in an immersion in Australian schools that lasted for 11 months. This paper reports on a sample of 22 male and female teachers coming from primary and secondary KSA schooling contexts. The participating teachers in the study were those who had participated in the Australian STEM immersion professional learning program in 2019-2020. Drawing from previous studies (Ermeling & Yarbo, 2016; Greene, 2015; Kayi-Aydar & Goering, 2019; Piqueras & Achiam, 2019), we have proposed a framework involving four methods for sustainable professional development for STEM teachers: professional learning communities, communities of practice, action research, and the outside expert. A mixed-methods research design was applied including three methods: individual interviews, open-ended questions to identify the proposed plan of STEM teachers’ implementation of the sustainable professional development methods. Also, a questionnaire to identify obstacles to the implementation of sustainable professional development methods from the viewpoint of STEM teachers was also employed. The results showed that the most prominent obstacles to the implementation of the sustainable professional development methods by STEM teachers in the Saudi educational system where there is no coordination in the school meetings schedule for the members of the professional learning STEM education community, there is no clear plan for communities of practice of STEM education, teachers’ overload teaching duties, lack of coordination between schools to benefit from STEM experts. Implications of our study reside in developing teachers’ ongoing STEM professional development opportunities through execution of a sustainable model of collaborative teacher communities in KSA. Suggestions for curriculum stakeholders and administrator’s coordination and supporting teachers’ ongoing participation and implementation of professional development programs are discussed.
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