Enacting the purposes of epistemic practices to promote learning in Secondary Science

• In this presentation we address the issue of how teachers appropriate new concepts emerging from science education research, and how their use is transformed in actual teacher practice. We introduced the newly developed concept of organizing purposes (Wickman & Ligozat, 2010) as a tool for helping teachers plan for and assess student progression during science lessons. We video recorded meetings between teachers and researchers. Meetings concerned introducing the new concepts to the teachers and subsequently use them for planning and assessment of a teaching unit on the chemistry of food. We also video recorded all lessons, and used the introduced concepts also to jointly reflect on what happened during lessons. The results clearly show that the use of the concepts of organizing purposes and other aspects of the theoretical framework presented by the researchers was not fully adopted by the teachers until they were set in action in concrete classroom contexts. It was also important for the teachers’ engagement to recognize that changes proposed in their teaching practice improved some salient outcomes in the students. The results provide detailed insight into the mechanisms by which school science practice is slowly transformed as new concepts from research are introduced.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap -- Didaktik (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences -- Didactics (hsv//eng)

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kon (subject category)