Secondary teachers’ views about teaching and assessing the diversity of scientific methods in practical science

Figures & data

Table 1. Diversity of scientific methods (reproduced from Erduran and Dagher, 2014).

	Experiment/Observation
	Manipulate	Not Manipulate
Test Hypothesis	Manipulative Hypothesis Test	Non-Manipulative Hypothesis Test
Measure Parameter	Manipulative Description or Measure	Non-Manipulative Description or Measure

Figure 1. Overview of studies and data collection.

Table 2. Survey questions for Study 1.

Dimension	Survey question
A. Teaching of practical science	1. What is your definition of practical science? Can you give some examples? 2. Can you tell us how you normally plan and teach a practical science lesson at GCSE level?
B. Assessment of practical science	3. Has the move to written summative assessments influenced your teaching? If so, how? 4. What resources do you commonly use for the summative assessment of your students' learning in practical science lessons? 5. What practical science skills do you think should be assessed summatively at GCSE? Why?

Table 3. Participants’ demographic information for Study 2.

Teacher	Subject specialism	Teaching experience	Gender
Teacher 1	Biology	3 years	Male
Teacher 2	Physics	1 year	Female
Teacher 3	Biology	4 years	Female

Figure 2. Themes and sub-themes from the thematic analysis of the interview data.

Table 4. Sub-themes and examples for teachers’ choice of pedagogies.

Sub-theme	Axial quotation
Planning & Resources	I used basically a lot of the resources that we'd had so from the presentation, I basically used similar examples and talked about the idea of the Matrix. (T2)
Reflection on teaching	[the students] got more from that practical than they did from a similar one last week where I didn't use the hypothesis and that style of questioning. (T1)
	…it made the practical go better because it made the children think about what they were doing. (T3)

Table 5. Sub-themes and examples of teacher responses to Brandon’s Matrix and summative assessments.

Sub-theme	Axial quotation
Teachers’ understanding of Brandon's Matrix	I think certainly you don't have to have a hypothesis for science… and in terms of manipulation of a variable, with physics, that'd being impossible because there is stuff we can't manipulate (T2)
	If you look back and see that an awful lot of scientific discovery was done by mistake. …if you had to say that people's discovery only came from what we thought was possible, then you wouldn't make any progress. (T2)
Views on Brandon's Matrix	I love the idea of looking at science that's not hypothesis driven. I think in schools that's literally all we do [… .]. So I liked looking at all the other angles. (T3)
	I think that as a concept of getting students to think deeper about practical work, I think is very useful. (T2)
	I don't think it's necessarily particularly useful for a single practical. If it had been something that was part of the curriculum, I'd have spent more time on it. (T2)
Views on assessments	…the only way you could do it would be actually to have it in the curriculum and then see if it works or not. (T1)
	I didn't see that much difference between questions we have already had. (T2)
	It did feel like it was just a bit shoehorned in there as well. It's kind of an extra thing to think about. (T3)

Table 6. Sub-themes and examples of teachers’ perceptions of student response.

Sub-theme	Axial quotation
Perceived student performance	The students who would have and given any feedback generally like implied that it was hard. (T2)
	They managed the first two parts. So, it was the first making of a hypothesis that they had to make. But that very last one, where they had to design almost the whole experiment, I think it is where we lost where I lost them. (T1)
	They performed the practical very well…But they are a top set so they are able to perform practicals well. But this time it was tangible that they had to think about every step. (T3)
Perceived student enjoyment	They just felt it was another thing to do. It's just not another thing that we’ve now got to learn. (T3)
	It was almost like they felt like they had more ownership of it because they had more say in what they were actually doing. So, they understood the logic behind it. (T1)

Erduran, S., and Z. R. Dagher. 2014. In Reconceptualizing the Nature of Science for Science Education: Scientific Knowledge, Practices and Other Family Categories. Dordrecht: Springer.

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