Search

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the merits of lesson study (LS) as a research approach for research in (science) education. A lesson was developed to introduce students to model-based reasoning: a higher order thinking skill that is seen as one of the major reasoning strategies in science.Design/methodology/approachParticipants of the LS team were three secondary school teachers and two educational researchers. Additionally, one participant fulfilled both roles. Both qualitative and quantitative data were used to investigate the effect of the developed lesson on students and to formulate focal points for using the LS as a research approach.FindingsThe developed lesson successfully familiarized students with model-based reasoning. Three main focal points were formulated for using LS as a research approach: (1) make sure that the teachers support the research question that the researchers bring into the LS cycle, (2) take into account that the lesson is supposed to answer a research question that might cause extra stress for the teachers in an LS team and (3) state the role of both researchers and teachers in an LS team clearly at the beginning of the LS cycle.Originality/valueThis study aims to investigate whether LS can be used as a research approach by the educational research community.

The aim of this study is to develop more understanding about strategies to support teachers' professional development in curriculum innovations, in which pedagogy and content change simultaneously compared to the conventional curriculum. A pre-existing framework, including strategies for professional development, was adapted, implemented, and evaluated from the perspective of teachers' sense-making in teaching context-based science curricula. This framework guides the design of activities that support teachers' development in three new aspects of teaching context-based science units: setting a context in class, performing a new teaching role, and teaching new content. In a case study, six teachers in secondary education participated in a professional development program based on the adapted framework. A qualitative inner-case analysis was conducted to describe teachers' sense-making during the program, in terms of the categories “assimilation,” “accommodation,” “toleration,” and “distantiation.” Results showed that teachers participating in the professional development program successfully assimilated and accommodated all three aspects; however, the process of teachers' sense-making of the new content followed a different path compared to the processes of the other aspects. The relation between these results and the adapted framework are discussed to retrieve strategies for planning professional development programs to support teachers in curriculum innovations.

This review presents an overview and analysis of the body of research on special relativity theory (SRT) education at the secondary and lower undergraduate level. There is currently a growing international interest in implementing SRT in pre-university education as an introduction to modern physics. For this reason, insights into learning opportunities and challenges in SRT education are needed. The field of research in SRT education is still at an early stage, especially at the level of secondary education, and there is a shortage of empirical evaluation of learning outcomes. In order to guide future research directions, there is a need for an overview and synthesis of the results reported so far. We have selected 40 articles and categorized them according to reported learning difficulties, teaching approaches, and research tools. Analysis shows that students at all educational levels experience learning difficulties with the use of frames of reference, the postulates of SRT, and relativistic effects. In the reported teaching sequences, instructional materials, and learning activities, these difficulties are approached from different angles. Some teaching approaches focus on thought experiments to express conceptual features of SRT, while others use virtual environments to provide realistic visualization of relativistic effects. From the reported teaching approaches, three learning objectives can be identified: to foster conceptual understanding, to foster understanding of the history and philosophy of science, and to gain motivation and confidence toward SRT and physics in general. In order to quantitatively compare learning outcomes of different teaching strategies, a more thorough evaluation of assessment tools is required.

Case studies report enthusiastically on the implementation of escape rooms in science education. This mixed-method study explores beyond the early adopting teacher, as the perceptions of 50 teachers and 270 students were investigated. Escape rooms are time restricted games where participants work together and accomplish a specific goal. The escape rooms’ usability for education in terms of goals, experiences during gameplay, outcomes, and boundary conditions are studied, using multiple data sources: online questionnaires, interviews, classroom observations and movie clips made by students about their experiences. The use of mixed methods and large samples on this topic is a novelty. Results show that teachers of different ages, gender and teaching experience were appealed in particular to the diversity of activities offered that call for multiple skills and teamwork. Students experienced the need to think hard using multiple thinking skills and enjoyed the feeling of autonomy and mastery during gameplay. This is interesting, as an escape room setup is very strict, with few degrees of freedom. According to teachers and students, escape rooms are suitable for processing, rehearsing and formative assessment of science knowledge and skills. However, the time restriction during gameplay appears to be an ambiguous factor in student learning.

The global increase in recreational escape rooms has inspired teachers around the world to implement escape rooms in educational settings. As escape rooms are increasingly popular in education, there is a need to evaluate their use, and a need for guidelines to develop and implement escape rooms in the classroom. This systematic review synthesizes current practices and experiences, focussing on important educational and game design aspects. Subsequently, relations between the game design aspects and the educational aspects are studied. Finally, student outcomes are related to the intended goals. Educators in different disciplines appear to have different motives for using the game’s time constraints and teamwork. These educators make different choices for related game aspects such as the structuring of the puzzles. Unlike recreational escape rooms, in educational escape rooms players need to reach the game goal by achieving the educational goals. More alignment in game mechanics and pedagogical approaches is recommended. There is a discrepancy in perceived and actual learning of content knowledge in recreational escape rooms. Recommendations in the article for developing and implementing escape rooms in education will help educators in creating these new learning environments, and eventually help students to foster knowledge and skills more effectively.

In order to investigate students' misunderstandings of potential wells and tunneling, a conceptual knowledge test was administered to Dutch secondary school students after they were taught about quantum mechanics. A frequency analysis of responses to the multiple choice questions (n=98) and coding of the responses to the open-ended questions and explanations (n=13) shows that Dutch secondary school students experience difficulties similar to those reported for undergraduate students. The students' underlying difficulties were analyzed using a typology of learning impediments. Results of this analysis show that students have difficulty connecting knowledge of potential wells and tunneling to their prior knowledge. Students mainly have creative and epistemological learning impediments, which cause eight incorrect synthetic models.

A key theme in the science education literature concerns the reluctance of students to participate in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). Self-determination theory (SDT) states that social factors in an educational setting, such as teachers’ motivating style, can influence students’ motivation and engagement. This paper investigates the relationship between STEM teachers’ motivating style (autonomy support, provision of structure, involvement) and students’ motivation and engagement with regard to STEM. Furthermore, the relationship between students’ motivation and students’ engagement is investigated. Thirty classroom observations were conducted in different STEM lessons, to assess teachers’ motivating style and students’ engagement. The students’ motivation was assessed at the end of the school year, using an online questionnaire. The results reveal that STEM teachers’ provision of structure is positively linked to students’ motivation and engagement with regard to STEM subjects. The impact of teachers’ autonomy support was negatively predictive for students’ autonomous motivation, and positively predictive for students’ engagement. A negative relationship between students’ controlled motivation and engagement was found. Based on these results, this study suggests that taking teachers’ motivating style into account in future educational initiatives regarding STEM is highly relevant as a means of stimulating students’ motivation and engagement.

Item does not contain fulltext Incremental Grading is a student-driven assessment approach where students have the responsibility to grade their own work based on pre-defined assessment criteria, usually rubrics. The desired outcomes of Incremental Grading are higher self-assessment skills, higher ownership of learning, lower degree of procrastination, and a more distributed workload for teachers.The approach has been described as a pattern language in previous work and has now been applied in two courses for academic teaching. In this experience report we evaluate the effectiveness of Incremental Grading in these courses, using a mixed-method approach. The results show that Incremental Grading has a positive impact on the self-assessment skills of students, can positively affect the quality of their work and consequently their final grades, and makes teacher's feedback more valuable. EuroPLoP '20, 01 juli 2020

In this study, the conceptions of pre-university level secondary students with respect to radiation and radioactivity were investigated. A literature review determined what was already known about secondary school students’ conceptions that differ from scientific theory, regarding radiation and radioactivity. Next, 12 Dutch students and their teachers were interviewed. Half of the already known student conceptions were confirmed in the interviews. The most persistent conception was students’ inability to distinguish between irradiation and contamination. All newly discovered conceptions, such as students’ idea that radiation can exist independently of the source of radiation, were discovered within a medical context. A remarkable finding was that students have full confidence in medical professionals, while at the same time they believe that all medical imaging techniques are dangerous. It can be concluded that curricular developments and changes in teaching contexts lead to changes in student conceptions concerning established topics. Knowledge of these conceptions and how to change them might be an important focus for teacher training, as teachers play a role in overcoming conceptions that do not correspond with prevailing scientific theories and, at the same time, may be a source of these conceptions.

Sustainability has become a prominent theme in society and can be considered as an integral part of scientific citizenship. This study investigates to what extent the production, use and re-use of (bio)plastics initiates students’ reasoning and to identify the kind of content knowledge students put forward. The structure of students’ arguments was mapped according to Toulmin's model of argumentation,i.e., claim, data, warrant & backing and qualifier & rebuttals. Students (N= 27, grade 10 & 11) participated in groups of three. The students were introduced to the topic of the production, use and re-use of plastics by watching a video, answering questions, reading articles and having interviews and group discussions. Students were prompted to argue on the sustainability of bioplastics and fossil-based plastics. The results show that students frequently used arguments related to preventing pollution, designing to recycle and designing to degrade. However, themes such as avoiding waste, origin of energy and materials, energy efficiency and costs were rarely used or even absent in students’ reasoning. Overall, the students’ reasoning contained all of Toulmin's categories, and especially the increase in the number of qualifier & rebuttals is interpreted as an indication of awareness of the complexity of the issue at hand. This study underlines that students are able to bring in relevant scientific knowledge when confronted with a suitable sustainability issue, but also more societally oriented arguments enriched their perspective. Implications for the design of interventions aiming to engage students in life cycle analysis (on plastics) are discussed.

Inquiry-based learning (IBL) emphasizes learning through experiencing and constructing. Where IBL is often applied in science education, the conceptualization of IBL practices in mathematics education is less obvious. We compared students’ reports on IBL practices in two different teaching cultures as an attempt to better understand IBL practices in connection with overarching teaching cultures. In this study, we investigated IBL practices in lower-secondary mathematics lessons in the Beijing area and the Netherlands through a survey about the experiences and preferences of 858 Chinese students and 441 Dutch students. Results show that students from the Beijing sample reported experiencing IBL activities in most mathematics lessons, while students from the Dutch sample reported them in some lessons, and both preferred the same amount of IBL activities as they experienced. The Dutch sample reported little experience with posing questions to tackle. The study also suggests a correlation between IBL experience and IBL preference of each class: students with more IBL experience are likely to show a higher preference for IBL activities. Results of this study do not confirm expectations based on stereotypes about the two teaching cultures. The students’ perspective in both samples suggests that providing complex problems and organizing group work have potential for further encouraging IBL in mathematics.