Taking Advantage of the Synergy between Scientific Literacy Goals, Inquiry-Based Methods and Self-Efficacy to Change Science Teaching

The curricular statements of most European countries contain goals for scientific literacies and process competencies. However, we argue that direct targeting by teachers of these goals, or active achievement of them by students, may not actually occur. We report our experience of implementing a teacher development initiative aimed at supporting teachers to target these goals more directly through drawing on the natural relationship between scientific literacy and inquiry-based activities, while also focusing on the support potential of self-efficacy. In workshops, science teachers used concept networks of their national scientific literacy statements to help identify literacy-related objectives and then transformed existing lessons towards these objectives using inquiry in order to achieve the goals. We collected open-ended answers to standard questions concerning the strengths and weaknesses of the workshops, along with quantitative assessments of participant self-efficacy taken two or three times during each trial. We found that the use of concept networks of national scientific literacy statements helped science teachers readily identify objectives and then match inquiry-based lessons to achieve them. Also, societally relevant goals, when taught using engaging IBST/L methods, can be used to actively increase self-efficacy for the teaching and learning of science and hence provide substantial motivation for teachers and students. [For the complete volume, "Professional Development for Inquiry-Based Science Teaching and Learning. Contributions from Science Education Research. Volume 5," see ED613991.]