Testing a literature-derived model of the sources of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics graduate teaching assistant (GTA) teaching self-efficacy using structural equation modeling indicates that K–12 teaching experience, GTA professional development, and departmental teaching climate are significant predictors of teaching self-efficacy.
The purpose of this study was to examine the degree to which high school students improved their inquiry capabilities in relation to scientific literacy through their experience of a problem‐based environmental health science curriculum. The two inquiry capabilities studied were scientific questioning and approaches to inquiry into their own questions. A total of 129 high school students taught by two teachers in one school wrote responses to environmental health issues at the beginning and at the end of a 10‐week long inquiry curriculum. An additional group of 46 students of one of the two teachers learned an alternative curriculum and participated as a comparison group. The students using the inquiry curriculum performed significantly better than those using the alternative curriculum in posing active inquiry questions and generating hypothesis‐driven approaches to inquiry into their questions. The inquiry curriculum students also improved significantly from the pretest to the posttest in both measures of inquiry capacity. Among the students who were less prepared for inquiry in the beginning, 68% improved inquiry‐questioning capability, while among the students who were more prepared for inquiry, 36% improved in generating hypotheses‐driven approaches. Implications for curriculum design and implementation were provided along with further research suggestions.
This study explores the diffusion and adoption of discipline‐based education research (DBER) related to inquiry in introductory science laboratories at the undergraduate level. Two hundred and nine introductory science laboratories from four DBER journals which target instructors were scored for level of inquiry (limited, structured, guided and open). Results suggest a weak adoption of open and guided inquiry, which are practices supported by science education research (19% of the laboratories) and a low rate of reference to science education research literature (23% of the laboratories). Interestingly, citation of education research correlated with type of inquiry. Even though DBER has dramatically improved its reach over the last decade, there was no significant change in the level of inquiry in published laboratory experiments over the 2001 to 2010 decade. Despite evidence that inquiry process skills are important for student's content knowledge and research skills, this study indicates that DBER is having little impact on early undergraduate laboratory experiences. Funding provided by Department of Chemistry, University of Nebraska – Lincoln.
Active learning can improve student learning but can be more difficult to use in large classrooms. Course response systems (clickers) can be used to increase active learning and student discussion. In this study, students in a large introductory biology course were given clicker questions in different formats. Students were first presented with an open response question on a PowerPoint slide where no potential answers were visible. After peer discussion, the same question was presented with potential answers in a multiple choice format and students used their clickers to answer. For comparison, the same questions were asked in a different section of the same course but all questions were in the standard multiple choice format. The results show that C students perform better when required to create their own answer for the question. The instructor also noted that student discussions were longer, most likely because students had to discuss the biology rather than just confirming a specific answer choice.
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