From broad principles to content-specific decisions: pre-service physics teachers’ views on the usefulness of practical work

ABSTRACT

Practical work is widely seen as an integral part of school science. Research and teacher guidance have tended to consider practical work in science, rather than in individual science subjects or topics. This study used a questionnaire of selected- and open-response items to probe the views and reasoning of a sample of 43 pre-service teachers in England about the considerations that influence their use of practical work. Responses indicated a strongly positive view of the value of practical work to support a range of learning outcomes. A majority of respondents thought that the usefulness of practical work varies across topics due to differences in what can be directly observed and in potential to challenge learners’ ideas. Responses showed awareness of the key role of practical work in linking observations and ideas, but also highlighted challenges in applying broad principles about practical work to content-specific examples and a limited awareness of the range of possible types of practical activity. The study supports the view that researchers and advocates of practical work should engage with issues at a smaller grain size than hitherto in order to gain a better understanding of teachers’ decision-making and enable more effective classroom practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Practical work
• physics
• pre-service

Introduction: background and context

The aim of the natural sciences is to increase our understanding of the natural world, what it is made of, and how it works. A fundamental commitment of science is that claims and explanations should be consistent with observational data. The aim of science education is to expand students’ knowledge of the natural world and help them develop an understanding of the ideas and models that scientists use to explain and predict its behaviour – and to do so in a manner that gives learners some insight into the ways this knowledge and understanding has been achieved and of the grounds for accepting it. So it is not surprising that practical work (or laboratory/lab work) is a prominent feature of science education in many countries (Gericke et al., 2022; Lunetta et al., 2007). By practical work, we mean an instructional activity in which students handle or observe the objects, materials or phenomena they are studying.

The perceived importance of practical work is reflected in views across the academic research community (e.g. Bennett, 2003; Börlin & Labudde, 2014; Dillon, 2008; Ferreira & Morais, 2020) and also in government policy and other stakeholder reports from the UK (Department for Education, 2021; Gatsby Charitable Foundation, 2017; Lucas & Hanson, 2021) and in other countries (e.g. Eurydice, 2007; National Research Council, 2006). Additionally, the value of practical work is emphasised in publications aimed directly at teachers (e.g. Abrahams & Reiss, 2017; Banner & Hillier, 2018; Glasgow et al., 2010). Recent research into the views of students and other education stakeholders on what they felt were desirable attributes of a good physics teacher identified the effective use of practical work as one of the most important (de Winter & Airey, 2020).

For a long time, concerns have been expressed in many countries that school students get less experience of practical work in science lessons than is desirable (European Commission, 2007; Gatsby Charitable Foundation, 2017; National Research Council, 2006). Many research studies have also questioned the effectiveness of practical work, of the kind that is typically used, in achieving the intended learning outcomes (Abrahams & Reiss, 2012; Börlin & Labudde, 2014; Hodson, 1993; Lazarowitz & Tamir, 1993). Initiatives to improve the effectiveness of practical work have highlighted its central purpose of helping students to make links between observable features of objects and events and the ideas we might use to try to account for these – stressing the need for effective practical work to be ‘minds on’ as well as ‘hands on’ (Abrahams, 2011). Others have also emphasised the importance of clarity about the intended learning outcomes of any practical task (Hart et al., 2000) and the match of task design to intended learning outcome (Welzel et al., 1988).

As regards task design, we can identify some broad ‘types’ of practical work that students carry out in class. These include guided discovery, parameter measurement, hypothesis testing, exploration of variables relationships (‘fair testing’), or predict/observe/explain tasks (Erduran & Wooding, 2021; Watson et al., 2001; White & Gunstone, 2014). In addition to the choice of type, teachers make more detailed design decisions, for example about the degree of guidance given to students in making a task more open or closed, or the extent and nature of pre- or post-task discussion (Millar, 2010).

Developing teachers’ awareness of these decisions and choices in planning and teaching, and of the considerations that might inform them, has been highlighted as both important and challenging for pre-service and in-service teachers (Abrahams & Reiss, 2012; Nivalainen et al., 2010; Spaan et al., 2017). One approach that has been suggested is to provide teachers with a checklist for analysing practical tasks that they use or might consider using, drawing attention to specific choices of design and presentation in the classroom (Millar, 2010).

It is common however, for policy documents and pedagogic initiatives to discuss practical work in school science rather than in the individual science disciplines. Similarly research has typically been carried out on practical work in school science rather than in the separate sciences. There are, however, considerable differences between the main school science subjects (biology, chemistry, physics, Earth science), and indeed between topics within any single science, in ontology, epistemology, data collection methods and techniques, and styles of reasoning (Kind & Osborne, 2017). So the extent to which, and the ways in which, practical work might support the learning of the things we wish students to learn may differ from one science subject to another and across topics within a science. It is therefore of interest to explore the extent to which teachers recognise these differences and allow them to influence the choices they make in their own teaching. In this study we focus on the teaching and learning of physics topics. The issues we explore, however, are relevant to all of the sciences and will arise in the teaching of any science subject.

Our purpose in exploring these issues is to provide empirical evidence that might inform physics teacher education. It has been suggested that the beliefs, attitudes and dispositions of physics teachers heavily inform their classroom practice but once established are also relatively resistant to change (Etkina et al., 2017). Understanding the perspectives of pre-service teachers, who may not have fully developed these dispositions, will provide a valuable starting point for the development of any reforms. We chose to explore the views of pre-service teachers of physics in England as this is the group with whom we work most closely. This study could be seen as an example of teacher action research, to stimulate evidence-informed reflection on our current teaching practices.

From an international perspective, there are significant differences in the ways in which pre-service teachers are educated (Darling-Hammond, 2012; Evagorou et al., 2015; Sickel & Witzig, 2017). Even within England, the situation is complex and changing (Allen & Sims, 2018). Most pre-service teacher education in England takes the form of a one-year, postgraduate course, with roughly equal numbers of students following school- and university-based routes. There are generic mandated national standards for all (Department for Education, 2011) but no subject-specific detail. This highlights the need for research and practice-based attention to discipline-specific aspects of science teaching, such as the use of practical work.

Research approach

The aim of the research study reported in this article was to gain a better understanding of the views of beginning teachers of physics on the usefulness of practical work for teaching and learning in physics, and of the reasoning that underpins these views. This can provide evidence-based support for our pedagogic aim of helping teachers reflect in a productive way on their use of practical work. We aimed to answer the following research questions:

1. How useful do pre-service physics teachers consider practical work to be for achieving specific kinds of learning outcomes in physics?

2. To what extent do pre-service physics teachers consider there to be differences across topics within physics in the usefulness of practical work as a teaching strategy and what considerations underpin these views?

Our main interest is in the second of these. By asking about possible differences across physics topics, we hoped to get beyond general (and perhaps rhetorical) statements of broad principles about practical work and elicit more detailed views supported by content-specific examples. From the answers to these questions, we hoped to gain insights that could inform the design of inputs in pre- and in-service physics teacher education to help teachers use practical tasks more effectively.

Data collection methods

As we wanted to collect responses from a substantial sample of pre-service physics teachers across as wide a range of contexts and training routes as possible, and to get as much detail as possible about teachers’ ideas and reasoning, we opted to use a questionnaire containing a mix of selected response and open-response items, and to administer this online as schools were at the time working virtually to cope with a national Covid-19 lockdown.

The questionnaire consisted of three items designed to elicit progressively more reflective responses from respondents who may not have explicitly considered the issues about which we were concerned. Responses for an item could not be changed once respondents moved on to a subsequent item. The items were:

• Item 1: Orientation. asking respondents to reflect on the usefulness of practical work for a range of possible learning outcomes.

• Item 2: Variation across topics. exploring the extent to which they felt that the usefulness of practical work varied between topics in physics.

• Item 3: Specific Examples. probing responses to item 2 further by asking respondents to compare the use of practical work in two specific topics in physics.

The questionnaire items are summarised in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Summary of the questionnaire items.

Item 1 was intended as an introductory probe to start respondents thinking about practical work and give a broad-brush picture of their views on its usefulness. It presented five possible cognitive learning outcomes of practical work that are commonly identified in previous literature (Bennett, 2003; Hodson, 1990; Hofstein & Lunetta, 2004). Respondents were asked to rate the usefulness of practical work for achieving each outcome when teaching physics. To avoid constraining their thinking to the learning outcomes suggested, respondents were asked to add any others they thought important. Items 2 and 3 then aimed to explore respondents’ views on practical work in greater depth and detail, by asking them to consider whether they thought the usefulness of practical work varied across topics. Item 2 posed this question generally without mentioning specific topics; item 3 asked for more detail and specifically mentioned two core topics of the school curriculum, Newtonian mechanics, and DC electric circuits. We chose to probe at the level of topics, rather than specific learning outcomes, as we could be reasonably confident that our respondents would recognise and have some experience (as learners and as beginning teachers) of the main physics topics and hoped that their free text responses might include examples relating to specific learning outcomes.

Text-only questionnaires can cause participants to lose interest (Tymms, 2017) and so, to break up the page in the hope of maintaining engagement, we began item 2 with a pair of speech bubble statements asking respondents to pick the one that they most agreed with before asking them to explain their choice. At this stage, the questions just spoke of ‘usefulness’ with no further detail, aiming to elicit as wide a range of reflections as possible.

Item 3 was then designed to prompt respondents to express their reasoning more fully and explicitly by asking them to compare the usefulness of practical work for teaching two specific topics. We chose DC circuits and Newtonian mechanics. Both topics are often taught using significant amounts of practical work and are also very likely to have been experienced by respondents as beginning teachers and certainly as school students themselves. There are also significant differences between the topics in the instruments and procedures used to collect quantitative data and in the kinds of practical task that might be used, for example DC circuits providing more opportunities for testing specific predictions. So these two topics seemed well suited to elicit a wide range of responses. We deliberately did not choose topics such as radioactivity or astrophysics where practical work is hard to carry out. In item 3a we asked respondents to think and comment on the amount of practical work they would do and in 3b asked about the type of practical work of they would use and the ways that they would use it. We did not say explicitly what was meant by ‘type’ in order to see how respondents characterised and described the variety of practical tasks they might have used or experienced. The questionnaire was piloted with a sample of early career physics teachers to ensure that the questions were well understood and generated a wide range of responses aligned to the research question (Creswell & Creswell, 2018). This was the case and no revisions were needed.

Study sample

In the 2019–2020 academic year, there were 527 pre-service physics teachers training in England across all school- and university-based training routes. Cohort sizes are very often small; almost half of courses nationally have only one or two physicists (Department for Education, 2019). As there is no publicly accessible database, it is impossible to contact the national cohort directly. To maximise the number and range of participants, we distributed invitations electronically. This invitation included a link to the online questionnaire, researcher contact details, ethical information and explanation of the nature and purpose of the study. Invitations were distributed in two ways, and we estimate that up to 180 pre-service teachers (34% of the national cohort) received one. Firstly, the Institute of Physics sent the invitation to all 115 of those who were in receipt of their Teacher Training scholarships, awarded through a competitive process to those who show the highest potential to be successful as physics teachers. Secondly, we contacted teaching staff on 14 different school and university based pre-service physics teacher education courses, many with traditionally large cohorts and asked them to pass the invitation on to the pre-service physics teachers studying with them. Additionally, we asked them to forward the invitation on to personal contacts who taught on similar courses. The questionnaire remained open for 8 weeks and we let those distributing it decide on the extent to which they wished to issue participation reminders to their individual cohorts.

Forty-three trainees responded, representing 8% of all those on a pre-service physics teacher education course in England at the time and around 25% of those who received an invitation. Responses were anonymous but we collected contextual data from respondents on age and gender, to allow us to compare the responding sample to national data.

The national population of pre-service physics teachers has a male: female percentage distribution of 69%(M):31%(F); in our respondents it was 71%(M):29%(F). Data on the age of those in teacher education in England is not available for individual subjects. National data for trainees in all subjects (Department for Education, 2019) showed that 50% of teacher trainees were under 25; in our sample 33% were 24 or under. Nationally 24% of trainees were aged 25-29; in our sample 26% were aged 25-34. So the sex and age distributions in our sample reflect the national picture. As responses came from those who were sufficiently motivated to participate, we cannot claim that the respondents are more generally representative of the population. Our aim, however, was not to measure or evaluate teachers’ ideas but rather to get some insight into common ways of thinking in the population about the role of practical work. The responses of our sample are perhaps more likely to over-estimate the depth of insight and reflection in the population than to under-estimate it.

Data collection took place during March and April 2020 when participants were six or seven months into their one-year initial teacher education courses. This was just as the first English national Covid-19 lockdown began; up to this point, teacher education courses had run normally, without interruption. The requirements of pre-service teacher education in England mean that regardless of whether participants’ course was school- or university-based, they would all have spent around two thirds of that time in school. They would have been in science classrooms daily and gained considerable experience, even if not always as the teacher responsible for planning and teaching the lesson. This would have provided them with considerable experience of providing and managing practical work in science to augment their experience as learners. There are also some benefits of the respondents being in their pre-service education. During this period, they are consistently encouraged to reflect critically on their own practice and that of others, rather than simply accepting what they see or do.

Data analysis

Forty-three completed questionnaires were returned. As might be expected, some did not contain answers to all items. Selected-response items were answered by between 43 and 36 of our respondents. Free text explanations for their choices were provided by 31 respondents and many contained considerable detail. Across a total of 86 free text responses to items 2 and 3, the average length was 57 words. The free text responses were imported into Atlas.ti for textual coding and analysis. Initial coding was inductive, following a process of thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Whole or parts of the free text responses were identified as of note or interest and highlighted, grouped and then allocated a descriptive code to identify common views, opinions or perspectives. From this the data were reconsidered, codes merged and separated, checked and revaluated until themes were established that appeared to inform the respondents’ choices and align with their explanations. In this process, whilst holding the overarching research questions in mind, we tried to remain open to what was being said and to avoid the constraint of a tighter or predetermined framing (Silverman, 2006). This coding allowed us to generate what Braun and Clarke call themes. In their definition, themes are able to capture ‘something important about the data in relation to the research question, and represent[.] some level of patterned response or meaning within the data set’ (2006, p. 82). Whilst the data were collected anonymously, during the analysis each respondent was identified by a number so that it was possible to consider the views of individual respondents across questions and also to ensure that we did not give undue prominence in the analysis to the views of a subset of the sample through our selection of quotes. Data coding was initially carried out by the first author. This process was then cross-checked by the second author and allocation of codes agreed. Data used to address the second research question came from responses to both items 2 and 3. This strengthens validity by ensuring that themes identified represent the full data set and inconsistencies or discrepant data, if any, become evident.

Findings

We will present the findings and analysis with reference to each of our research questions in turn.

Usefulness of practical work in teaching and learning

The first research question asked how useful pre-service physics teachers consider practical work to be for achieving specific kinds of learning outcome. Data to answer this question came from questionnaire item 1. This item sought to elicit pre-service teachers’ overall views on the usefulness of practical work at a general level and act as an orientation question to help them think broadly about the aims and value of practical work. The responses are summarised in Table 1. This shows a strongly positive view across the sample of the usefulness of practical work to achieve all of the five learning outcomes proposed. Of the 215 responses across the five learning outcomes from the 43 respondents, 92% of responses rated practical work as either fairly useful, very useful or essential, with 71% in the latter two categories. Only 1% of all responses rated practical work as not useful for any learning outcome and, apart from a single respondent, all rated it very useful or essential for one or more learning outcome.

Table 1. Participants’ rating of the usefulness of practical work for specific learning outcomes.

Learning Outcome	Number of respondents (n = 43) choosing each rating
	[1] Not Useful	[2] Marginally Useful	[3] Fairly Useful	[4] Very Useful	[5] Essential	Total [4 and 5]
to develop students’ competence in using laboratory equipment and carrying out laboratory procedures	0	2	0	13	28	41 (95%)
to encourage accurate observation and description of natural objects, materials, phenomena and events	0	3	9	13	18	31 (72%)
to develop students’ ability to design and implement a scientific approach to investigating an issue or solving a problem	0	5	9	12	17	29 (67%)
to enhance understanding of scientific ideas (theories, models, explanations)	1	1	13	18	10	28 (65%)
to develop students’ ability to present, analyse and interpret data	2	4	14	14	9	23 (53%)

Whilst there is strong skew towards the positive end of the rating scale for all of the suggested learning outcomes, the pattern of responses also shows some variation across the learning outcomes. The Friedman test indicates that the differences in respondents’ views on the usefulness of practical work in school science, across these learning outcomes, are statistically significant (Friedman’s Q = 36.9; d.f. = 4; p < 0.001).

The Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks test can then be used to explore significant differences in pairs of outcomes. This analysis is shown in Table 2 with significant differences (after Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons) denoted by an asterisk (*). As the values of p indicate, practical work is seen as significantly more useful for developing competence in using laboratory equipment and carrying out laboratory procedures than for three of the other four outcomes. This suggests a strong endorsement of the value of ‘hands-on’ activity for enhancing practical skills. Conversely, the value of practical work in developing ability to present, analyse and interpret data was rated less useful than each of the other four outcomes, though only to an extent that is statistically significant in one case. This perhaps reflects an awareness that competence in data handling might be developed through a range of classroom strategies. Looking at the two outcomes that focus on science content learning (which questionnaire items 2 and 3 explore more deeply), there is not a statistically significant difference in the perceived usefulness of practical work for encouraging accurate observation and description of natural objects, materials, phenomena and events and for enhancing understanding of scientific ideas (theories, models, explanations).

Table 2. Pairwise comparison of ranking of usefulness of practical work for five learning outcomes. Value of Z (and in brackets p) from the Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks test.

	to develop students’ competence in using laboratory equipment and carrying out laboratory procedures	to encourage accurate observation and description of natural objects, materials, phenomena and events	to develop students’ ability to design and implement a scientific approach to investigating an issue or solving a problem	to enhance understanding of scientific ideas (theories, models, explanations)
encourage accurate observation and description of natural objects, materials, phenomena and events	2.362 (0.018)	-	-	-
to develop students’ ability to design and implement a scientific approach to investigating an issue or solving a problem	3.359 (<0.001*)	0.365 (0.715)	-	-
to enhance understanding of scientific ideas (theories, models, explanations)	3.737 (<0.001*)	1.465 (0.143)	0.973 (0.330)	-
to develop students’ ability to present, analyse and interpret data	4.374 (<0.001*)	2.238 (0.025)	2.692 (0.007)	1.097 (0.273)

Note: With Bonferroni correction for 10 pair-comparisons, p-values below .005 are considered significant and indicated with an asterisk (*).

The strength of the positive rating of usefulness of practical work for all five outcomes is perhaps closer to the view of practical work in the science education policy literature (e.g. Gatsby Charitable Foundation, 2017) than in the research literature (e.g. Abrahams & Reiss, 2012). It may also reflect the population being investigated; the views of practical work of beginning teachers are likely to be strongly influenced by their own experience of (and enjoyment of) school science practical work as learners and by their perception of the view of practical work within the professional community they are preparing to enter. The ratings of teachers with several years’ experience of using practical work in their classrooms might be somewhat different, as has been identified with respect to demonstrations in chemistry (Clermont et al., 1994).

When asked to suggest additional learning outcomes that practical work could support, 20 respondents (47%) did so, making a total of 33 extra suggestions. These were coded and grouped. Two that were mentioned by at least four respondents (10%) were:

• To support teamwork/collaboration (n = 10)

• To generate curiosity, awe or wonder (n = 4)

Almost a third of respondents commented that practical work can support group work and collaboration, though none provided any further detail. Practical work may therefore be quite widely seen as providing useful opportunities for students to work collaboratively in small groups, though the development of specific group working skills is unlikely to be seen as the primary intended learning outcome of a practical activity. Responses pointing to the social interactions that groupwork can facilitate and those mentioning curiosity, awe and wonder indicate that, in addition to cognitive learning outcomes, some teachers value the affective outcomes of practical work (Abrahams, 2009).

Summary (RQ1)

In asking research question 1, we wished to gain a better understanding of the strength of beginning teachers’ views that practical work is useful for supporting various learning outcomes. The responses show strong agreement that practical work is useful for pursuing all of the learning outcomes proposed. Respondents rated its usefulness greatest for learning outcomes related to use and manipulation of equipment and lowest for outcomes concerned with data handling. The usefulness of practical work for encouraging accurate observation of objects and events was ranked higher than for enhancing understanding of ideas though the difference was not statistically significant.

Differences between topics

The second research question asked about the extent to which pre-service physics teachers consider there to be differences across topics in the usefulness of practical work as a teaching strategy and about the considerations that underpin their views. Data to answer this came from questionnaire items 2 and 3. Both consisted of a selected-response item followed by a request for additional free text detail. Item 2 asked for views on possible differences in usefulness of practical work between topics in physics generally. Item 3a then posed a similar question about two specified topics, asking respondents to select one of three statements about the relative amount of practical work they might use when teaching Newtonian mechanics and DC circuits and to explain their reasons in a free text response. Item 3b asked respondents to consider the type of practical work that they might use in the two topics and to explain the reasons behind that. There were 37 responses to the selected-response part of item 2, 36 to item 3 and 31 free text responses to both items.

Responses to the choice of statements in items 2 and 3 are summarised in Table 3. In item 2, a substantial majority of respondents indicated that they think there is variation in the usefulness of practical work between topics in physics. The free text responses to item 2 from the minority that saw equal usefulness across topics often contained caveats suggesting that their position was somewhat ambiguous. Responses to item 3a were less clear cut about this for the two specific topics named, with half indicating that they would use more practical work when teaching one topic than the other. This may be because of the limited amount of direct teaching experiences that respondents had across different topics in physics. Additionally, it may be a consequence of the two topics that we asked them to compare so these findings are not logically inconsistent with the pattern of answers to item 2. There was not, however, agreement in item 3a as to which topic might warrant more practical work. Taken together, the strongest conclusion we can draw from these responses to these two items is that most respondents see some variation in the usefulness of practical work for teaching different physics topics.

Table 3. Respondents’ views on difference in usefulness (Item 2) (n = 37) and amount (Item 3a) (n = 36) of practical work between topics.

Questionnaire Item	Statement	Percentage (%) of respondents
2	Practical work is more useful in teaching some physics topics than others	70
2	Practical work is equally useful in teaching all physics topics	30
3a	I'd use more practical work when teaching Newtonian Mechanics	22
3a	I'd use more practical work when teaching D.C. circuits	28
3a	I'd use about the same amount of practical work in both topics	50

In the earlier discussion of the questionnaire design, we indicated that we deliberately used (and highlighted) the terms amount and type to encourage respondents to reflect on the kinds of practical activities they would use and not just the number of them. Responses, however, did not provide as clear a delineation between these as might have been hoped, so the analysis that follows is based on a combined data set of all free text responses to items 2 and 3. From an analysis of these, using the methods described above, four themes appeared to inform many respondents’ views. These were:

• Pragmatic considerations

• Practical work and misconceptions

• The ‘seen’ and ‘unseen’

• Types of practical work and design decisions

We will present the findings on each of these themes in turn with illustrative quotes and commentary. The issues raised in comments on the second, third and fourth themes are so interconnected that we will discuss them together in a subsequent Reflections on the findings section.

Pragmatic considerations

As might be expected, many responses pointed to the fact that, for some physics topics, practical work is not feasible in a school setting – and that this had an inevitable impact on the amount that would be done.

… there are some topics such as particle physics, nuclear physics and medical physics where practical work is very hard to do and there aren't many options (regardless of whether it would be useful) [P11]

… very expensive / impossible to do practical work [P40]

… others, for example space physics and atomic structure, are much harder to do practical work as most of the subject is on scales that are not easily accessible [P31]

Twelve responses (33%) mentioned pragmatic issues of this sort. Of these, seven also highlighted safety as a reason for not carrying practical work even where it was felt to be beneficial:

I think that students would greatly benefit from being able to measure the radiation that penetrates different materials as an aid to developing their conceptual understanding … . But I would never do this practical work with students because of the serious health and safety risks involved [P15]

… safety issues always need to be considered. Where safety might be a concern, online simulators might be used instead of ‘hands on’ [P26]

This recognition that practical work may not be possible for some topics in physics should perhaps be seen as a qualification of the strongly positive evaluation of the usefulness of practical work at the subject level in Item 1, with more nuance appearing at topic level.

Practical work and misconceptions

Several respondents (n = 6) mentioned connections between practical work and student misconceptions, suggesting that it could both challenge (n = 4) or potentially seed them (n = 2):

[practical work can] provide highly visual, ‘easy-to-see’ results that may challenge instantly some previously held notions [P6]

I feel like the practical and the idea it is trying to elucidate must be very closely linked for this to be effective, else you risk confusing students or introducing misconceptions [P12]

[using the wrong equipment has] the capacity to lead to misconceptions [P29]

All of the comments on how practical work could help address misconceptions related to Newtonian mechanics:

I think practical work is especially useful to help students overcome misconceptions, … For example, Newton's laws are not intuitive and practically demonstrating these is powerful [P36]

I think there are more misconceptions to be addressed in Newtonian mechanics and these can be investigated using practicals [P43]

It was, however, noticeable that none of these responses identified a specific misconception that practical work might help learners to overcome. Although comments about misconceptions were made by only a relatively small number of respondents, they show that some beginning teachers are thinking of practical work as a tool for making connections between observable phenomena and the laws and theories that we use to explain them. In the additional learning outcomes suggested in response to item 1, three respondents also expressed this view. And the idea arises again in the discussion below of the other two themes.

The ‘seen’ and ‘unseen’

Many responses expressed the view that many ideas in physics are abstract or impossible to observe (e.g. the model of electrons moving in a wire) and that this was a source of teaching and learning challenges that could vary across topics. For example, one respondent commented that:

Physics can often be an abstract subject, and the transition from mental frameworks and mathematical descriptions to practical real-world experiments varies greatly within the subject [P6]

For those respondents who felt there was a difference in the usefulness of practical work between topics, almost half (n = 14) expressed these ideas in terms of what they felt students were or were not able to observe directly.

I think practical work is more useful when you can directly observe the effect you are studying. For example, when studying diffraction you can see water waves bending around an obstacle in a ripple tank. Or, investigating Young's modulus, you see a wire stretch as you add mass. You can see something has happened and you can go on to describe it (semi)empirically [P12]

Hooke's law […] is very easy to demonstrate in a lab and accurate observations of the phenomena can be made [P5]

In all but one of the comments from respondents about what could and could not be observed, the important aspects of mechanics events were seen as readily observable whereas those involving DC circuits were not.

I would use practical work to help provide a visual understanding of the key concepts of Newtonian physics- as it can be seen [P3]

In contrast practical work for DC circuits provides less of a visualisation of the underlying physics [P25]

For example, Newton's laws are not intuitive and practically demonstrating these is powerful. However, for topics like electricity I think many experiments have limited value, because students can't really see for themselves what's going on [P36]

These comments were typically, however, rather imprecise about what can and cannot be seen, referring to ‘key concepts’, ‘underlying physics’ and ‘what’s going on’. This is an issue to which we will return later.

Types of practical work and design decisions

Eighteen responses to questionnaire item 3 (58%) commented on the ways in which practical work might be managed, structured, and implemented. Where detail of the type of practical work was provided, it almost always related to one of two types of activity: (i) open, exploratory work where students had some freedom to choose what to do; or (ii) more tightly constrained work, where students follow instructions to collect prescribed data sets, or to observe and document a particular phenomenon or event.

In the responses where types of practical work were suggested, there was agreement about the type best suited to the two named topics, illustrated by the following responses:

Personally I would be inclined to teach Newtonian mechanics practicals as discovery practicals whereas I'd use practicals relating to electrical circuits to reinforce taught knowledge [P9]

DC circuits – mostly measurement based, setting up circuits which are pre-defined, taking readings, plotting graphs etc. Newtonian-based practicals give more scope for flexibility – for using a range of equipment and for allowing the students to design their own experiments [P43]

Overall, 13 respondents (42%) expressed the view that a more open, discovery-type, qualitative approach was best suited to practical work in Newtonian mechanics. For DC circuits, 10 respondents (32%) suggested that more constrained, controlled activities would be preferable. There was only one respondent whose views did not align with one or both of these two positions, proposing that open, exploratory work would be of benefit and value in both topics.

Across a wide range of often detailed comments there was almost no mention of any other types of practical work other than from one respondent who mentioned the potential value of practical work in testing hypotheses. That apart, there was little or no reference to other types of practical work. Even if the topics specified in item 3 may have narrowed respondents thinking, it was noticeable that the range of the types of practical work mentioned was limited. We will return to this in the discussion section.

Summary (RQ2)

In research question 2, we wanted to probe pre-service physics teachers’ views on possible differences across topics in the usefulness of practical work. The aim was to elicit more detailed and reflective views about the usefulness of practical work than the data from questionnaire item 1 could provide, and to gain a better understanding of the reasoning behind these views. The responses showed that many beginning teachers do see differences on a topic level. Pragmatic considerations and the role that practical work can play in addressing misconceptions were mentioned by some. We also identified two other themes in the reasoning behind teachers’ views. What teachers felt could or could not be directly observed was noted by many as a reason for differences between topics in the usefulness of practical work. Additionally, many also expressed a view that the type of practical work that they would wish to carry out would vary between topics, with more open exploratory work being more suitable for some topics and more constrained, teacher-directed work for others.

Reflections on the findings

As we have indicated earlier, comments on three of the themes identified in the responses to questionnaire items 2 and 3 (those relating to misconceptions, what is ‘seen’ and ‘unseen’ and types of practical work and design decisions) were quite strongly interconnected. Together these contribute to answering our second research question, about perceived differences in the use of practical work between topics and the considerations that underpin teachers’ views.

As the discussion above has indicated, many responses showed that many beginning teachers are aware, when thinking about practical work, of the distinction between observations and explanatory ideas and of the role of practical work in helping learners to make links between what have been termed the domain of objects and observables and the domain of ideas (Millar et al., 1999). This is positive and encouraging in that they were moving beyond a general view of the value of practical work to one that recognised the need for a tactful approach in using practical work to promote students scientific thinking (Yoon & Kim, 2010). It suggests that they are considering the reasons why they might use practical work rather seeing it as a ‘taken for granted’ element of science teaching, as many science teachers (see, for example, Donnelly, 1995) and policy makers (Gatsby Charitable Foundation, 2017) do. The responses to questionnaire items 2 and 3, however, suggested that many were not applying the distinction between the domains in ways that were convincing and might inform the design and implementation of effective practical work.

This emerged particularly in responses to questionnaire item 3, exploring perceived differences in the use of practical work in teaching Newtonian mechanics and DC circuits. The reason given most frequently for a difference between these topics was the extent to which respondents felt learners could ‘see’ the things they wanted them to see. This was felt to be the case for Newtonian mechanics but not for DC circuits. One response quoted above talked of this in terms of students’ ability to ‘see for themselves what's going on’. But other responses (also quoted earlier) talked about the extent to which practical activities provided a ‘visualisation of the underlying physics’ or ‘a visual understanding of the key concepts’. The ideas and relationships summarised in Newton's laws of motion (the ‘key concepts’ or ‘underlying physics’) cannot, however, be directly observed, but are firmly in the domain of ideas. The motions of objects as they interact can be observed; ‘velocity’, ‘acceleration’ and ‘force’ are constructs that have been developed to quantify our observations and propose explanations for them, but are not directly observable entities. The view that ideas such as the relationship between force and acceleration can be readily inferred from the kind of practical work and associated observations that are carried out in school laboratories is an instance of what Driver (1983) called ‘the fallacy of induction’ – the idea that explanatory ideas will ‘emerge’ from careful and directed observation of the phenomenon of interest.

On the other hand, whilst it is clearly true that the explanatory entities and mechanisms used to account for DC circuit behaviour cannot be directly observed, many electrical phenomena are observable (such as the relationship between voltage (number of cells in series) and ammeter reading or lamp brightness). So the responses raise some questions about the way respondents are using the general idea of observables and ideas when thinking about specific examples of practical work.

Comments about how misconceptions might be confronted through practical work were similarly at a general rather than a content-specific level. All were about the teaching of mechanics. None, however, gave an example of a misconception that might be challenged by a specific practical activity or observation. So the set of responses provided no evidence about how respondents might apply their awareness of the prevalence of misconceptions in physics when choosing or designing a practical activity to support the teaching of a specific point or idea.

Alongside this, there is the evidence from this study that many beginning teachers have not yet developed an awareness of the range of types of practical work that are possible in school science and consider only a very limited repertoire of possible designs for practical activities. When asked about possible variation across topics in the type (as opposed to the amount) of practical work they would use, it was striking how narrowly respondents interpreted the idea of types of practical work and the associated design decisions. Most of the comments on type were about open inquiry or tightly-directed, data collection tasks. No responses, for example, mentioned other types of practical work from the literature noted earlier, such as guided discovery, parameter measurement, ‘fair testing’, or predict/observe/explain and only one respondent mentioned hypothesis testing. At such an early stage of their career it is perhaps not reasonable to expect teachers to be fluent and confident with all the different types of practical work that they could use, but if they have a limited range of task designs to select from then this will inevitably impact upon the choices they can and do make.

Implications for research and practice

This study lends support to the view that research and discourse on practical work in school science should explore issues and views about its role in teaching and learning at a smaller grain size than has been usual in the past. Reviews of research and policy papers on practical work in school science (e.g. European Commission, 2007; Gericke et al., 2022; Lunetta et al., 2007; National Research Council, 2006) commonly discuss and make recommendations about its use in ‘science’, without exploration of possible differences in its manner of use or its effectiveness across the science subjects or across topics and learning outcomes within each science.

We suggest that attention, not merely at the level of separate science subjects but at the level of the main topics within them, or of specific teaching and learning points within topics, may yield additional insights that can be used to inform teacher education and classroom practice. In our questionnaire study, we used the level of topic as a means of eliciting more detailed reflections about the usefulness of practical work from pre-service teachers. We accept that the usefulness of practical work is likely to vary across different learning outcomes within any topic and believe that future research on practical work should explore its effectiveness for achieving specific learning outcomes (Hart et al., 2000). It would not, however, have been productive to ask questions at such a detailed level in a questionnaire study of beginning teachers. Probing pre-service teachers’ views and ideas at topic level did, however, provide insights into the considerations that influence teachers’ choices and decisions about the use of practical work.

This study sought the views of beginning teachers of physics. It would be interesting and useful to put the same questions to a sample of more experienced teachers whose responses can draw on greater classroom experience and more time and opportunity for reflection. An interview study might also yield richer data by probing responses more deeply (Mears, 2017), and exploring specific activities and their associated intended learning as has been done in research on other aspects of teachers’ use of practical work in science education (Abrahams & Reiss, 2012). These could provide a fuller understanding of teachers’ views on the issues we have explored here and could further inform the design and provision of in-service teacher support to improve the effectiveness of practical work.

Whilst our study targeted physics and specific topics within it, the findings have implications for the other sciences. Similar questions about variation across topics and learning outcomes arise in the teaching of all science subjects and even more acutely for the teaching of ‘integrated’ or ‘general’ science. Similar studies of teachers of other science subjects, using a wider range of topic-specific examples across the sciences, could help to build greater knowledge and understanding of the reasoning that informs teachers’ choices in their use of practical work.

With respect to implications for pre- and in-service physics teacher education, we hoped that answers to our research questions might inform decisions about the kinds of input would be of most value in helping teachers to review the practical tasks they use and consider changes that could increase their effectiveness. This would build on previous work in this area such as the Getting Practical (Abrahams et al., 2014) and Project Calibrate (Erduran & Wooding, 2021) programmes in the UK and well as other related international work (Millar, 2009; National Research Council, 2006). Our study supports the view that any such inputs will have greater impact if they encourage reflection on practice in teaching specific topics and learning outcomes in that topic, rather than in teaching physics (or any of the other sciences) in general. In other words, they should help teachers to see how to apply their general awareness of the goal of making links between the domain of objects and observables and the domain of ideas to each of the major topics and specific ideas they have to teach. We would suggest that pre- and in-service physics teacher education should initially focus on establishing the ‘two domains’ model as an analytical framework to help teachers interrogate and reflect on their practice. Building on this, they should be provided with opportunities to discuss and identify the objects/observables and the ideas involved in some typical practical activities they are likely to encounter, drawing on established resources designed to support them to become confident in doing this (Abrahams & Reiss, 2017; Millar, 2010).

In addition, we see value in supporting teachers to broaden their repertoire of types of practical tasks (Erduran & Wooding, 2021; Watson et al., 2001; White & Gunstone, 2014) and make thoughtful and deliberate design decisions. Supporting them to develop confidence with these decision-making processes may lead to more effective practical work.

Like the implications for research identified above, this study suggests that interventions in pre- and in-service science teacher education to improve the effectiveness of practical work need to build on existing generic best practice in science by supporting additional reflection and analysis at a more fine-grained level. Teachers should be encouraged to explore how broad principles which they accept about the use of practical work can be translated into thoughtful content-specific decisions and choices about the teaching of individual topics and intended learning outcomes within topics.

Declaration of interest statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Ethics statement

Whilst a study of English teachers, the first author’s main affiliation is at a Swedish university and so the study followed established praxis in Educational Research in Sweden that no specific external ethical approval is required when dealing with adults who individually grant informed consent. University and departmental regulations have been followed in terms of both how informed consent was obtained, the types of data that may and may not be collected and the provision for withdrawal of consent. Collected data is stored and destroyed in accordance with GDPR.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Ogden Trust, Professors John Airey and Mark Winterbottom for their support with this work. We are grateful to Fred Lubben for his valuable comments on an earlier version of the article and the two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions that helped improve the final manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).