Teaching Traditions in Science Teachers’ Practices and the Introduction of National Testing

ABSTRACT

Our main interest in this article is to explore whether Swedish teachers changed their teaching and assessment practices in relation to the new national tests in science education that were introduced 2009. Data was collected using a web-distributed questionnaire, which was answered by 407 teachers. The concept of teaching traditions is used to capture patterns of what is emphasized by teachers in terms of goals and content in teaching and the design of the questionnaire was based on the concept of curriculum emphases. The results show two distinct groups of focus, which are compared with two traditions within science education: the Academic and the Moral tradition. The main content where teaching has been changed is in making science more applied than before, where applied not only means the application of science knowledge to practical technical issues, but also to moral and political issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Teaching traditions
• science education
• standardized tests
• teacher survey
• educational change

Acknowledgements

The final work on the article was done during an intensive working week on Fårö, Gotland – thanks to the Ingmar Bergman Estate Foundation, which made this possible.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In the Swedish text, Östman (1995) calls the selective traditions “Akademisk” and “Romantisk.” We chose to translate “Romantisk” to Moral, since Moral more accurately describes the content of the tradition.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council [grant numbers UVK 2010-5153 and UVK 2012-5023].