Study

last updated:December 2004

What did the research find out about teaching and learning in science?   
The findings include the following eight key points:

• diagnostic probes helped teachers find out where their students were starting from when they approached core science phenomena
• diagnostic probes provided opportunities for teachers to engage with students about their reasoning in science lessons
• the availability of diagnostic probes led to more discussion in class, which stayed well focused on the key ideas probed; several teachers reported that the probes helped them teach topics outside their science specialism with greater confidence and in more interesting and interactive ways
• increasing the time and attention paid to points of known learning difficulty paid off in better understanding of the explanations for the phenomena being studied
• increasing the quality of classroom talk (teacher-student and student-student) helped to create better understanding of scientific phenomena
• many teachers were uncomfortable teaching about the nature of science processes and often omitted treatment of it in the face of pressures arising from teaching science curriculum content
• the effectiveness of teaching the nature of science was related to teachers’ own understanding, to their views of the teachers’ role in science lessons and to their ability and willingness to adopt less transmission-focused methods
• teachers agreed with the idea that research could inform their practice but often felt that its findings were not credible to them or not presented in a form which was useful.

In the following sections of this RfT we present more details about the work carried out by teachers and researchers in the four project areas.

What were the ideas about students’ thinking in science which underpinned the research?

• From their analysis of previous research, the researchers suggested that difficulties in the teaching and learning of science were often related to students’ misconceptions of science. They went on to add that many misconceptions arose from the everyday concepts of science students brought to school and the language they used to describe them. The researchers started from the project team’s premise that research about students’ talk about science indicated the following problems:
• Students draw on their existing concepts to explain simple, scientific events using frameworks of ideas that are often very different from the accepted scientific knowledge at the time. These frameworks are remarkably resistant to change.
• Some misconceptions in students’ thinking about scientific phenomena reflect the use of two different languages – a pre-instructional social one which students bring with them and which is more or less shared by the whole group of learners – and a more formal and precise scientific one. The teacher has to help move the students from the former towards the latter.
• The everyday notions can persist for considerable periods of time. Previous research (see Driver in Further Reading has noted, for example, that students of different ages all (incorrectly) drew on the idea of ’suction’ rather than the scientific concept of differences in pressure to account for related phenomena such as the behaviour of a liquid when somebody drinks it through a straw.
• Students’ misunderstandings arise from:
  
  • explaining science phenomena using everyday ideas and processes such as ‘suction’ rather than the underlying causes such as air pressure difference. Students explain photosynthesis in plants as being analogous to animals’ feeding
  • lack of understanding of the forms of reasoning used in science, leading to inappropriate or inconsistent use of science ideas; and
  • gaps in factual knowledge, such as not regarding air as a real substance with a mass.

The research summarised in this RfT related to an exploration of students’ misconceptions about scientific phenomena and to the difficulties students’ find in using the methods of science, and the ways in which teachers could build on the everyday ideas about science that students brought into their classrooms.

Bringing out students’ prior understandings: what are diagnostic probes and how did teachers use them?
Teachers and researchers worked together to create a tool (a bank of diagnostic probes) which aimed to enable teachers to:

• more easily collect data about their students’ learning so that they can adjust their teaching as necessary
• provide ready feedback to students about their knowledge and understanding.

The researchers:

• worked with a group of teachers to develop a bank of diagnostic questions that could be used easily by teachers to monitor and evaluate pupils' learning in four important science topic areas (electric circuits; forces and motion; matter and chemical change; biochemical life processes (digestion, respiration, photosynthesis))
• used these questions to explore the progression in understanding of a large sample of pupils aged 9-16
• explored, with a panel of teachers, how the diagnostic question bank could be used to support their teaching and enhance student learning.

Two tier probes were designed – the first question asked for a prediction about what the student would expect to observe in a given situation, the second then asked for the best explanation for this. Other questions probed the consistency in students’ use of an explanation in different related contexts. Some questions were more open-ended and many were designed for group discussion.

Twenty teachers provided evidence about how they had used the probes and the impact which they had on their teaching. They used them to:

• rapidly assess the understanding of all the students in a class
• stimulate small-group and whole-class discussion
• teach the subject matter in a more interactive way – particularly when they were teaching outside their own subject area
• clarify their own ideas about the subject matter.

More than half of the teachers agreed that the probes stimulated discussion in their lessons to a greater extent than they had managed to do previously. One teacher commented favourably that the probes lent themselves to ‘a much more interactive, discursive approach….a style of teaching I prefer…perhaps I haven’t been confident in physics before to risk it. This has given me an impetus.’

An example of a diagnostic probe is presented later in the RfT.

In the case study section of this RfT we look at the way a teacher used concept maps for diagnostic purposes.

Colleagues may like to read a case study about diagnostic probes developed and used by a group of teachers.

What did diagnostic probes tell teachers about their students’ thinking?
Drawing on evidence provided by students’ responses to the probes the researchers found that students’ understanding of some basic ideas of science was quite low and often increased little with age. Specifically they reported that:

• fewer than 50% of students at age 14 appreciated that electric current is the same at all points of a series circuit, and the figure was about the same among 16 year olds
• fewer than 25% of 14 year olds showed good understanding of forces on objects moving with constant velocity or slowing down
• only about 50% of 14 year olds understood that mass is conserved in physical and chemical changes (this rose to 60% at age 16)
• fewer than 50% of students aged 14 were able to successfully apply the particle idea of matter to a range of physical and chemical situations.

The two tier probes showed that many of the students who used a scientific model correctly to predict the current in a series circuit did not do so in a second context. The researchers found this was also the case in other areas of science including the idea that mass is conserved in all physical and chemical changes including photosynthesis. This suggests that many students’ knowledge is insecure and their thinking often focuses on surface features, rather than the underlying general principles.

Did new science teaching approaches work any better than the usual ones?   
In a second, linked project the researchers worked with teachers to design and then evaluate new teaching sequences based on a detailed understanding of when and where students were most likely to hold misconceptions about science. They explored the impact of new teaching sequences on students’ knowledge and understanding of:

• plant nutrition
• changes in matter in terms of particles
• behaviour of simple electrical circuits.

The researchers found:

• in all but two of the 17 intervention classes, between 20% and 74% more students offered explanations more consistent with science principles than students in control classes
• teachers who had been involved in the design stage generally achieved larger improvements in results than the teachers who used the new sequences, but had not been involved in their design. The latter group, however, also achieved significant improvements in student learning
• teachers thought that the new teaching sequences were better at covering curriculum content objectives than the usual approaches
• teachers reported that their students found the new approach more enjoyable than other approaches
• teachers used more conceptually-focused talk when they used the new teaching schemes
• there were no significant differences on test questions requiring only factual recall between the students taught using the new sequences and those following the school’s usual teaching approach to the topic.

Each sequence was specifically designed to address a common misconception held by students in each of the key topics considered. These misconceptions have been identified by a number of empirical studies. (See, for example, Andersson (1991), Driver et al. (1993), Canal (1999)). The researchers measured students’ learning using sets of diagnostic questions covering content from the national curriculum for science. They evaluated the teaching sequences by collecting pre- and post-intervention data from classes taught by teachers who had participated in the design of the new teaching sequences (7 development classes) and also from the classes of other teachers who had not been so involved (10 ‘transfer’ classes) but who had used the new sequences. All results for intervention classes were compared with those of students in classes which followed the school’s usual teaching approach to these topics.

The researchers concluded that whilst there were undoubtedly teacher effects – no two teachers taught exactly the same way even when provided with the same material – the teaching sequence did matter and that when teachers specifically taught in a way which addressed their students’ misconceptions and encouraged students to talk about their developing understandings, students’ learning improved.

How did teachers and researchers aim to build on students’ existing understanding?

Establishing where students are coming from

To tackle this problem teachers and researchers worked together to develop an approach which incorporated two specific features:

• the recognition by teachers that science students bring an understanding of science based on everyday ideas and experiences to their lessons
• the underpinning idea that the learning of school science involves students’ using language which incorporates accepted science ideas and explanations.

The demands made by the gap between students’ everyday science concepts and scientifically accepted concepts - which the researchers call ‘learning demand – varies from topic to topic. For example, learning demand is high for the idea that electric current is the same everywhere round a series circuit. Students tend to think that current is ‘used up’. The learning demands in relation to understanding photosynthesis in plants are also high. Students try to explain photosynthesis in terms of plants ‘feeding from the soil’ in an analogous way to animal nutrition rather than in terms of the synthesis of complex molecules from simpler ones.

On the other hand there are other areas where the gaps in knowledge and language are less demanding, for example, in relation to basic ideas about the human skeleton.
How did researchers and teachers use ‘learning demand’ to plan lessons?

Whilst the researchers maintain that identifying students’ learning demand is an essential first step in building an appropriate and effective teaching sequence, it does not itself point to a specific ‘best’ teaching approach. Nonetheless they suggest that an analysis of learning demand can help teachers make more informed decisions about: the scientific content to be covered. They explored:

• the learning demand of different parts of the material to be covered and the amounts of time they will need
• how to structure the ‘story’ or sequence – particularly the use of scientific models, and the range of activities needed to support students’ learning at different points
• the form of classroom talk most appropriate for specific parts of the teaching sequence – whether teacher-led, closed and directive; whether between teacher and students or among students themselves; whether closed and teacher-directed or open and inviting the use of explanations.

The researchers suggested that planning lessons is unlikely to be a linear process and the identification of learning demand is likely to develop from the teacher’s knowledge of the curriculum to be taught and his/her consideration of the ways students think and talk about science ideas.

They suggest too that explanatory theory can either come:

• before the main activities in a lesson to provide a theoretical structure with which subsequent ideas, activities and discussion can be compared and adjusted – this might be suitable when the specific scientific language and its use is particularly important, such as in teaching and learning about current electricity
• towards the end of the activities as a theoretical structure the teacher and students work towards and construct through a variety of classroom activities including observation and measurement.

In this context, explanatory theory might include an analogy which is simpler in conception than the abstract theory. One example is the analogy of bread vans delivering bread, or water flowing round a pipe, to help students conceptualise electric current and energy transfer in electric circuits. Decisions about when to use explanatory theory would depend on the teacher’s appraisal of the nature of the students’ learning demand.

The researchers worked with nine teachers to prepare three short teaching sequences of 4-6 lessons each in areas that research suggested students found conceptually difficult. Features of the new schemes involved:

• making time and space in lessons for discussion of conceptual matters
• making the order of teaching reflect the key steps in learning
• encouraging different kinds of classroom talk, explicitly linked to the different kinds of learning involved at different stages.

An example of a teaching sequence designed by teachers and researchers working collaboratively is presented at the end of the study section. Common misconceptions and suggested teaching goals are also presented.

We present a case study about how teachers identified and attempted to address students’ misconceptions in chemistry.

What kind of teacher/pupil talk supported students’ learning?   
Suggestions for different kinds of classroom talk were built into the teaching sequences and included:

• teacher talk, for example, when presenting new ideas
• teacher-student talk where the teacher uses open-ended questions in order to provide students with opportunities to try out new ideas, to give the teacher feedback about their students’ understanding, and to indicate to the teacher when scaffolding might be helpful
• teacher supporting talk where the teacher uses key questions and offers appropriate responses to students’ questions as they develop and fine-tune their ideas.

As students became more confident in their understanding they completed additional activities which required them to apply their new knowledge in related but different contexts. In this phase of the lesson there were opportunities for the teachers to use open-ended talk to develop the idea that scientific theories and models are generalisable and can be used to understand and explain what is happening in a range of contexts.

In one discussion, a teacher asked open-ended questions about electric currents to stimulate reflection. The discussion followed experimental work in which students measured the current in different parts of a series circuit:

Teacher: Can you explain what current is?
Student 1: Electrons
Teacher: And what happens to them when they get to the bulb?
Student 1: They light up the bulb but they still carry on
Other Students come in: ..but they spend their energy in the bulb
Student 1: Maybe it’s like a flow of electrons there’s not less electrons but they’ve got less energy.

In this extract the teacher offered students the opportunity to make extended responses. For the teacher the absolute accuracy of the scientific facts related by the students is less important than how they are thinking about the problem.

In case study 4 we show how some teachers worked to improve their students’ discussion skills.

What should students know about science processes?   
In recent years the science curriculum and its assessment has made many more demands on students’ understanding of the processes of science and of the nature of the knowledge that science produces, for example, in assessments of science investigations coursework. This is an area of science which is not usually taught explicitly in a sustained way. Often the understanding and skills necessary for students to generate, analyse and use scientific information are treated separately from the rest of the science curriculum content.

The third project undertaken by the EPSE Research Network attempted to explore what a curriculum to support scientific literacy (and therefore including understanding of nature of science, or ideas-about-science) might look like. The researchers sought views about what should be taught from science education experts including teachers, writers, scientists and philosophers of science. The twenty-three participants were asked to say what they thought all students should be taught about science to prepare them for life in a modern democracy. Nine themes emerged, grouped under three headings:

• nature of scientific knowledge, including:

          o science and certainty
          o historical developments of scientific knowledge.

• methods of science, including:

          o scientific methods and critical testing
          o analysis and interpretation of data
          o hypothesis and prediction
          o diversity of scientific thinking
          o creativity
          o scientific questioning.

• institutions and social practices in science, including:

          o cooperation and collaboration in the development of scientific knowledge.

A curriculum for scientific literacy would include key ideas such as why scientific knowledge is never definitive but always open to legitimate doubt, why and how scientific knowledge changes, how ideas are tested in science, the skills scientists need in order to interpret evidence and build theories and the part played by creativity and imagination. Furthermore the science educators felt that students should understand that science is a painstaking, collaborative, as well as a competitive, activity that often involves international communities of scientists working over long time periods.

In order to explore teachers’ confidence and ability to engage students in learning about the methods of science, a number of teachers taught lessons addressing specific aspects of the nature of science. Evidence drawn from lesson observations suggested that:

• students engaged more in the task of analysing data when the task was authentic and they had some ownership
• when teachers were skilful in prompting and cueing, students were able to work together to tease out hypotheses, to sort out causes and effects; and to suggest what to do to test ideas.

In relation to the kinds of classroom activities which were authentic and gave students ownership of the material the researchers reported that students did not respond well when teachers contrived to set up a task as a vehicle for conveying a particular point. The most authentic situations were those in which rather than receiving precise instructions a context was established by the teacher, students were given the tools to explore the problem and were offered the opportunity to participate in open discussions about how to tackle the problem themselves.

Evidence also suggested that many students find it difficult to:

• make predictions based on scientific evidence
• distinguish between an observation and an inference
• communicate in words the information provided by a graph showing a relationship between variables
• use models to explain the behaviour of scientific systems.

To find out about an approach which explicitly aimed at developing students’ skills in related areas see our RfT summary 'Cognitive acceleration through science education' (CASE). Whilst CASE is different from teaching the nature of science and is focused on the development of general thinking skills, it does incorporate developing students’ thinking about and using variables, looking for patterns and expressing relationships between variables scientifically, and generalising from scientific data. These are features of higher order thinking and of the processes of science.

What can we learn from the teachers’ experience of teaching the nature of science?

The research team worked with eleven teachers from Key Stages 2, 3 and 4 in order to develop strategies and materials for teaching the nine themes identified in the study of science education experts’ views. Details of data collection are presented later in the RfT and included classroom observation. The researchers looked for patterns in teachers’ behaviour and identified five dimensions of practice, which are illustrated in the table below.

On the basis of teachers’ observed behaviours the researchers suggested that effective teaching of the nature of science was associated with:

• a willingness to facilitate learning rather than to dispense knowledge even if it meant relinquishing some control over the lesson
• a willingness to ask open-ended questions although in some cases teachers reverted to more closed questions
• an emphasis on ’how we know’ rather than ‘what we know’
• situations in which teachers created environments which offered their students the opportunity to find ways of tackling problems for themselves.

The evidence highlighted considerable differences among the teachers in their positions on the five dimensions, reflecting the beliefs and dispositions of the teachers in the study, the extent to which teachers felt constrained by the syllabus, the nature of the class and the teaching and learning styles the classes were familiar with. In some cases individual teachers were situated largely on the left of the range for all the dimensions but it was also found that teachers who were on the left of the range on one dimension were not necessarily on that side for the other dimensions. The researchers also commented that as their confidence grew teachers tended to move towards the right hand column in their behaviours.

Most teachers found it difficult to relinquish some of their control, but one teacher was happy to do so and made an important point about spending time developing learning seemingly at the expense of the syllabus content:

'It’s ok to waste a lesson….you know there is no content in this lesson…. The group [that I’ve been working with] have done no differently, no worse than any other group that has been through the same course….You can’t compress it if it’s just squashing a module into [less time] …but if you get them to do something then use the information, you have actually gained an enormous amount, I think.’ (Brenda)

[The researchers add that the lesson did not, of course, have ‘no content’, but that the content took the form of development of ideas about science, or understanding of ways of reasoning that can be used in dealing with scientific data. This may be ‘invisible’ to teachers, but is not non-existent.]

Evidence also suggested that for some science teachers the open type of discourse is unfamiliar territory:

‘There may be approaches which I would be much more comfortable with if I was say, a history teacher…especially when it’s got to do with text or discussion…But…I’m not as skilled in that.’ (Mike)

Colleagues may be interested to read a case study about one teacher’s efforts to give her students more ownership of their science work.

What did teachers think made science education research both trusted and useful?
In the final project, ‘User’s perceptions of research’, the research team explored the views of 62 teachers of science education practitioners, including teachers, to assess the potential of science education research to have an impact on policy and practice.

The study found that for research to be trusted and useful enough to have an impact on teachers’ practice it needed to have:

• convincing findings drawn from studies with clear, rigorous methods which have the potential to be generalisable to other contexts – ‘It’s not a convincing piece of research when you have such a small sample….And not necessarily with your ordinary, average teacher either’ (secondary focus group)
• findings which they could contextualise in their own experience – ‘I tend to look at things that I can often relate to as either currently in my practice, or […] that’s happened to me….’ (primary focus group)
• direct relevance to their needs and interests – ‘It depends on the type of research that’s done. If it’s on learning styles and thinking styles then it can have quite a major impact. I recently went on a course, not a science course but a learning styles course…and that’s had a major impact on the way I teach…’ (Samina, primary teacher)
• illustrations of activities which help them relate the findings to their own work – ‘…we wouldn’t look at research first and say “oh there are many improved results, therefore we will do it”’ (Hazel, secondary teacher)
• practical implications which are clear to the practitioner – ‘In terms of 11-16 work research by Lovell…that students up to the age of 16, the average student is unable to consciously control one variable, so that it pervades a lot of the work I do when we’re looking at course work, experimental planning,…’ (Richard, secondary teacher)
• accessible, straightforward writing – ‘[Research findings] can be a little on the impenetrable side. And if they are made accessible then the likes of me and the ordinary teacher can get hold of them more easily.’ (Gail, other science education practitioner).

The assessment regime in English schools was seen as a barrier to engagement with research – ‘We would have to be less results driven…People who get good results are scared to change in case their results go down.’ (Hazel – secondary teacher).

The researchers commented that the teachers set very high standards as regards rigorous methods of data collection and generalisability in reports of educational research, perhaps because of their own training in science methods.

Whilst lack of time and the difficulty of accessing research were widely seen as barriers, personal contacts between teachers and researchers had the potential to significantly increase teachers’ engagement with research and the likelihood of its having an impact on teachers’ practice. Teachers identified a range of personnel who could link them with the research community including LEA advisors, and ITT or CPD tutors. Meetings and publications of the Association for Science Education were also recognised as offering opportunities for teachers and researchers to exchange ideas. Teachers’ engagement with research was also inhibited by the absence of a culture of informing their own practice with research findings.

Teachers found reported research outcomes that had been transformed into curriculum materials, teaching approaches or other useful resources particularly helpful. (The GTC Research for Teachers web feature is an initiative designed to address the problem of teacher engagement by relating findings from research to teaching and learning in the classroom.)

How was the research project designed?
Overall the research involved over ninety teachers and their classes in over twenty schools in a network of related research projects which aimed to explore the potential for science education research to inform policy and practice.

Project 1
The researchers worked with a group of science education practitioners, including twenty teachers, to design diagnostic probes which were:

• readily usable by teachers in their classroom
• constituted a valid and reliable test of children’s knowledge, understanding and reasoning
• had the potential to provide teachers with rapid feedback.

Twenty teachers in eight schools implemented the probes and evidence about students’ understanding of key concepts and the teachers’ use of the probes was collected by:

• students’ responses to the probes. The researchers sampled groups of 200 students for all four topics (electric circuits; forces and motion; matter and chemical change; biochemical life processes (digestion, respiration, photosynthesis)) at the ends of KS 2, 3 and 4. Altogether twelve different student samples, each of 200+ students, were involved in this work
• interviews with teachers.

Project 2
The development phase of the study involved collaborative working between the researchers and nine teachers to develop new teaching schemes in biology, chemistry and physics, based on research about students’ understanding and common misconceptions in science.

Each of the nine teachers implemented the new teaching sequences in their classrooms and data about the effectiveness of the teaching schemes and the way teachers used them were collected by a number of methods including:

• classroom observation including a video-recording of each lesson
• diagnostic tests to probe students’ understanding before and after the teaching sequence – from the intervention classes and from similar classes in the same schools which had not experienced the new teaching sequences
• interviews with teachers.

In the second part of the study thirteen teachers who had not been involved in the development of the teaching schemes used the plant nutrition and simple electrical circuit modules with their classes. A similar range of video and test data was collected as in the development phase of the project, including comparison test data from similar classes in the same schools.

Project 3
In the first part of the study the researchers involved a panel of twenty-three experts in science education including teachers. Participants’ views about the content of a science literacy curriculum were collected through a series of three questionnaires. Researchers analysed each of the first and second sets of responses to identify and aggregate responses into themes which subsequently emerged in a consensus via the third questionnaire.

The research team then used a case study approach based on eleven schools to collect data about the way teachers used a number of classroom exercises based on ideas-about-science and how their students responded. During a period of six days, spread across a year, the teachers were helped to understand the themes and to trial materials and share their experiences with their colleagues. All teachers were observed teaching two lessons and the researchers made video-recordings of the lessons. Field notes and other sources of data, including teacher diaries and questionnaires, helped to complement the observation data.

Project 4
The findings of the final project which explored practitioners’ views about, and use of, education research, were based on interviews with sixty-two science education practitioners, including:

• twenty teachers with research experience
• twenty-one teachers without research experience
• twenty-one others from a range of backgrounds including policy (QCA, OfSTED, DfES), authors of text books, HEI, LEAs, science curriculum and examiners.

The researchers also collected data from six focus group meetings. All interviews and discussions were transcribed and analysed for themes using coding. To establish reliability more than one person did the coding.

The research projects we have summarised used a collaborative approach to teacher development, involving both teachers and researchers in science education. This strikes a chord with the findings of a recent EPPI review about the impact of CPD on teaching and learning in the 5-16 age range that teachers engage more readily with research in collaboration with other professionals including researchers.

You can read a summary of the review in an earlier RfT, 'The impact of collaborative CPD'.

Filling in the gaps   
The research has highlighted the persistence of a number of misconceptions held by students regarding, for example, the nature and behaviour of electric currents in simple circuits, the relationship between forces and motion, the particle model of matter, and photosynthesis in plants. Have you found any teaching and learning strategies which have worked well on these – or other topics of similar conceptual difficulty - in your own classes? Or have you noticed other misconceptions that it might be useful for researchers to explore?

One message from the research reported in this RfT is that when outcomes are translated into tools and resources such as diagnostic probes or teaching sequences teachers are more likely to use them. Perhaps HEIs could undertake research and development in this area and fund schools and teachers to experiment with a range of research-informed resources? Partnerships between teachers and academic researchers may be the most effective way of doing this. Do you think this would be helpful?

Creating and sustaining learning situations in which teachers relinquish some control to students is a difficult move for many teachers to make. Is this an area which research could explore? Could teachers who have investigated such learning situations help others by reporting their findings? Write to us so we can add to the case studies, at research@gtce.org.uk

One of the implications of this research project is that current assessment practice may give a misleadingly positive impression of students’ conceptual understanding in science. Teachers in this study used diagnostic probes to try to get a better measure of their students’ conceptual understanding of science and a teacher in one of the case studies used concept maps for this purpose. Are there other possible approaches? Would it be helpful for research to investigate this area? Can you offer case studies of such efforts?

The study suggests that when it comes to developing a curriculum to support scientific literacy, there are significant problems in assessing students’ abilities to apply scientific reasoning, for example. The development of the Science 1 coursework component explicitly demands an application of scientific method but experience suggests that it is difficult to teach how to apply scientific methods, the role of models and the evaluation of rival scientific theories. Have you come across any useful approaches to this task? Could you describe them so that future researchers know more about the evidence in schools?

The research identified a lack of suitable assessment material in relation to the nature of science. Is this an area where researchers and schools could collaborate in testing possible approaches?

Implications for teaching
    
Whilst preparing this summary of the four projects the RfT team noted a number of implications for teachers.

• Collaborative working was a key feature of the research. Would you find it helpful to discuss students’ common misconceptions with colleagues in order to make it a key part of lesson planning in your school/department?
• At one point the researchers commented that the absence of a culture which encouraged the use of research findings was seen as a barrier to engagement with research by teachers. Would it be possible for head teachers or senior curriculum leaders to begin to create such a culture by:
  
  • disseminating key research literature targeted at specific needs and interests
  • engaging in reflective dialogue with their teachers
  • making their school more permeable to ideas, for example, byidentifying a real need and encouraging some of their teachers to forma study or research group to tackle the issue?

• This project showed that actually doing the research was more effective for teachers than simply using it. Whilst research is difficult to carry out in schools because teachers are so busy, small scale actionresearch has been used by many teachers to tackle problems in theirclassrooms. Would it be possible and useful for you to work with acolleague to explore issues related to teaching and learning using peerobservation, for example, related to teacher use of dialogue?
• The study provided evidence that teaching students the nature of science is difficult as so much attention is focused on content. Is teaching and learning the nature of science something on which you and your colleagues might find it useful to collaborate in order to identify and build on best practice, perhaps within a network of schools?
• Would it be possible to build into your lesson planning a number of more open-ended activities in which your students were able to take more ownership, as far as health and safety considerations allow?

What tools did teachers in the projects use? Some examples
    
What did a diagnostic probe look like?

This is an example of a two-tier diagnostic probe.


******************diagram****************

The two bulbs in this circuit are identical.

(a) How bright will the bulbs be?

Tick ONE box

[ ] Bulb 1 is lit. Bulb 2 is off.
[ ] Bulb 2 is lit. Bulb 1 is off.
[ ] Both bulbs are lit. Bulb 1 is brighter than bulb 2.
[ ] Both bulbs are lit. Bulb 2 is brighter than bulb 1.
[ ] Both bulbs are lit, with the same brightness.

(b) How would you explain this?

Tick ONE box

[ ] The first bulb uses up all of the electric current, so there is none left for the other one.
[ ] The first bulb uses up some of the electric current, so there is less left for the other one.
[ ] The electric current is shared equally between the two bulbs.
[ ] The electric current is the same all round the circuit.

How a sequence can be built for teaching and learning about electric currents in simple circuits

The learning aims are:

• current is best thought of as a flow of charge
• current flow provides the means of energy transfer
• current is conserved in a circuit
• the battery is the energy store in the circuit
• energy is transferred from the cell to the resistive elements in the circuit and on to the environment.

Students’ ideas are likely to include:

• batteries run out
• electricity makes things work
• current, electricity, volts and power are the same kind of thing
• electricity/electric current flows round a circuit through each component sequentially.

The learning demands then focus on a number of concepts including:

• a clear mental model that includes the ideas of charge, current, and energy
• the idea that the current consists of a flow of charges which carry the energy from the cell
• the current starts simultaneously in each part of the circuit when the switch is closed
• the current is not used up but has the same size at any point round a series circuit
• this moving charges model of an electric circuit can be used to predict and explain the behaviour of many electric circuits.

In planning a teaching sequence the researchers suggested that teachers might:

• build on the students’ ideas that batteries make things work and that electricity/current flows; (Students could here be given hands on experience of a simple series circuit and work in groups to discuss ideas)
• introduce and support the idea that an electric current is a flow of charges which carries energy from the battery to the other components in the circuit and hence into the environment; (The teacher could present an analogy based on vans (charges) delivering bread (energy) to a supermarket which they can link to the accepted scientific model)
• emphasise that the current is the same size all round the circuit and is not used up; (Students could explore this practically.)
• help students develop a mental model that differentiates between charge, current and energy
• set students more tasks extending the model to other contexts. (Students could explore this practically – this would provide opportunities for students to discuss together and for the teacher to probe and develop their understanding.)

Full details of the teaching sequences are available from the research team at:
http://edupc1130.leeds.ac.uk/research/scienceed/epse_teach_resources.htm

Common misconceptions relating to photosynthesis and possible teaching goals
Teachers in three schools tested a teaching sequence relating to photosynthesis. Based on previous research about students’ misconceptions in science they began with characteristic patterns of students’ thinking about photosynthesis identified in the literature, including:

• in parallel with their ideas about animal nutrition, students’ tendency to think of plants ‘absorbing’ food from the soil
• confusion between photosynthesis and respiration
• not appreciating the role of sunlight as an energy source
• a lack of appreciation that photosynthesis, like other biological processes, involves chemical reactions
• difficulty in accepting that a liquid (water) and a gas (carbon dioxide) can combine to give a solid (glucose)
• a lack of understanding that the carbon dioxide ultimately ends up in a range of plant food materials.

Consideration of these patterns of thinking and the misconceptions contained in them, the teachers and researchers worked together to set out the teaching goals it would be necessary to incorporate into the lesson plans. They included:

• opening up the students’ own ideas about food
• providing students with the opportunity to see that gases do have mass
• demonstrating that although it sounds implausible, gases and liquids can combine to produce solids
• showing that photosynthesis does work by exploring the production of glucose in leaves of green plants
• developing the idea that glucose combines with other materials to produce a range of plant food types including other carbohydrates, fats, proteins and chlorophyll.

Your Feedback
Have you found this study to be useful? Have you used any aspect of this research in your own classroom teaching practice? We would like to hear your feedback on this study. To share your views with us email: research@gtce.org.uk