Connecting the Science Practices to Teaching and Learning: Preservice Elementary Teachers’ Professed and Intended Beliefs

ABSTRACT

Preservice elementary teachers need to be able to engage young students in science practices but may not have extensive experiences with those practices. They also may have contrasting beliefs about them, which inform their teaching practice. To understand preservice teachers’ beliefs related to science practices, we focus on the connections they made between the practices and teaching and learning. We followed nine participants from a physics content course, into a science methods course, and through their student teaching, collecting data including interviews, reflections, and lesson plans. We used our analyses of interviews and reflections to identify participants’ “professed beliefs,” and of lesson plans to identify “intended beliefs”; from the analysis, we developed a description of teaching and learning beliefs such as Autonomy & Curiosity and Develop Scientific Skills. The professed and intended beliefs of the participants formed connected clusters. We also found cases where these beliefs conflicted conceptually (e.g., when deciding to include many or fewer practices in each lesson or if the science practices are unique to science or can be applied generally). Our findings suggest that teacher educators need to be aware of more than just the professed beliefs of their preservice teachers. They should look for evidence of these beliefs in preservice teachers’ intentions as well.

KEYWORDS:

• Elementary preservice teachers
• longitudinal
• science practices
• teacher beliefs
• teaching and learning

Acknowledgments

We wish to acknowledge the university for grant money used to fund this project. We also wish to express our gratitude to the participants who took time for interviews and their hard work in advancing their knowledge and practice in elementary science teaching.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ The figure is not meant to display every possible connection one could make between the shapes.

² This research was approved by the institution’s IRB review board. Written consent was obtained from all participants. All proper names are pseudonyms.

³ Beliefs such as Build Student Understanding, Skills Beyond Science, Develop Scientific Skills, and Learning to Be Scientists could not be coded explicitly. While we could assume that participants incorporated science practices into their lessons with the intention of building understanding or helping students to develop scientific skills, these professed beliefs could not be evidenced directly as intended beliefs.

Additional information

Funding

This article was funded by the University of Michigan School of Education.