An Insight into Teachers’ Classroom Practices: The Case of Secondary Education Science Teachers

Abstract

Teachers’ knowledge rooted in classroom practices guides their actions when dealing with a specific subject matter. To assess the quality of these practices, a close examination of the “classroom reality” is needed. The present study, which was carried out in Greece, investigates secondary science teachers’ practices. To record these practices, we used special classroom observation tools as well as questionnaires to record students’ views of their teachers’ practices. The observation tools and the student questionnaire focus on specifically formed criteria deriving from aspects of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK). In total, 32 secondary science teachers and 1154 students participated in our study. The results indicated that the strong points of teachers’ teaching practices concern their subject matter knowledge, the use of representations, their questioning, their communication of the instructional objectives to the students, and knowledge of students’ difficulties. The weak points are related to the use of a variety of teaching approaches, the investigation of the students’ alternative conceptions, the experimental and ICT-based teaching, and the implementation of inquiry-based activities. The methodology employed in our study was fruitful in providing a holistic view of science teachers’ practices and can be used for investigating classroom practices of teachers of other subjects as well.

Students’ Perceptions of Biology Teachers’ Enacted Pedagogical Content Knowledge at Selected Secondary Schools in Lusaka Province of Zambia

“…For example, Chapoo et al (2014) found that their case teacher confidently implemented all five PCK components (knowledge of students' understanding of science, orientations toward science teaching, curriculum, assessment, and instructional strategies). Also, the finding that teachers' enacted knowledge of conceptual teaching strategies to a moderate level contradicts Sofianidis and Kallery (2021), who reported that teachers' knowledge of teaching approaches was weak.…”

“…The results support Halim et al (2014), who reported that low-achieving students did not consider teachers' knowledge of conceptual representation as significant for effective instruction. However, Sofianidis and Kallery (2021) found that knowledge of representations was among the teachers' strong points. Therefore, teachers need adequate knowledge of representation to present content in a clear and understandable way.…”

“…Further, Sofianidis and Kallery (2021) examined science teachers' practice using classroom observation and students' views. They reported that teachers' strong points in teaching included using representations, subject matter knowledge, questioning, explaining learning objectives, and knowledge of students' difficulties.…”

Student’s rating of secondary school physics teachers’ classroom practice: Implications for teaching and learning

“…This type of research allows the use of survey tools to obtain data and it also allows the quantitative analysis of data using frequency count, percentages, means, and other statistical methods. Atmowardoyo [37]; Sofianidis and Kallery [38] have used it in their research and found it to be useful in answering "how" questions. The population of the study involved all senior secondary two students (SS2) in Ondo, Nigeria.…”

Professional development for science teachers: A bibliometric analysis from 2001 to 2021

“…In the eligibility phase, the research members were assigned specific publications that they were required to read and then discussed with the team the eligibility of those publications regarding the research topic based on their titles, abstracts and keywords. This phase resulted in a total of 75 publications being excluded from the data collection due to some reasons, including irrelevant topics (Shaw et al, 2014;Sofianidis & Kallery, 2021;Vekiri, 2013), mismatching research subjects, either computer science teachers specifically (Nakajima & Goode, 2019;Ravitz et al, 2017) or higher education teachers/students (Pekdag et al, 2021).…”