1. Teaching Early Childhood Teacher Candidates How to Assess Children's Inquiry Skills in Science Learning
- Author
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Joohi Lee and Ji Yoon Yoon
- Subjects
Early childhood education ,Teaching method ,Rubric ,Science education ,National Science Education Standards ,Teacher education ,Memorization ,Education ,Pedagogy ,ComputingMilieux_COMPUTERSANDEDUCATION ,Developmental and Educational Psychology ,Mathematics education ,Grading (education) ,Psychology - Abstract
This article presents pragmatic information on teaching early childhood teacher candidates how to assess children's inquiry process skills. The authors list three important steps in choosing inquiry skills. They generated behavioral indicators for each inquiry skill, and designed an assessment rubric using number grading or a satisfactory/unsatisfactory rubric system. During the last two decades, educators including the leading organization of science educators, the National Research Council (NRC, 1996), have placed more emphasis on the importance of how children learn (process-based/doing science) in science education rather than what scientific concepts they can memorize (knowledge-based). According to the National Science Education Standards (NSES), the major goals of science education are to help children understand the modes of scientific inquiry and to foster their inquiry-based skills. Therefore, it has become necessary for teacher educators to teach future teachers how to implement inquiry-based science lessons as well as how to assess children's inquiry skills in science learning. Here, we present a pragmatic model that has been applied at the University of Texas at Arlington to teach early childhood teacher candidates how to design assessment rubrics to evaluate children's inquiry skills. Many have listed both basic (observing, classifying, communicating, measuring, predicting, and inferring) and integrated (identifying and controlling variables, formulating and testing hypotheses, interpreting data, defining operationally, experimenting, and constructing models) inquiry process skills in science learning. These are the scientific actions people apply when they do science (Martin et al, 2005). More importantly, it is essential to be able to assess these inquiry process skills in science learning.
- Published
- 2008