Research on teaching and learning in Physics and Chemistry in NorDiNa Papers

Abstract

This article provides an overview of teaching and learning processes in research on physics and chemistry education published in NorDiNa 2005–2013. Using the didactic triangle as our theoretical framework we developed a typology to analyse the data and used this to categorise 89 related research papers, from all levels of education (primary, secondary and tertiary). The results suggest that students’ characteristics, their understanding of the content and learning outcomes are studied frequently. In contrast, science teachers are studied much less. Most papers reported studies that had been done at the teaching organisation level. Course level studies and society level studies were also frequent. However, international level studies were few in this data pool. We conclude by discussing less popular research topics in the science education field.

Didactic Focus Areas in Science Education Research

“…Much less studied aspects were the teacher characteristics, what happens in the classroom while students are studying, how the teachers perceive the students' actions, attitudes and understanding, the students' feedback to the teacher, and teachers' self-reflection. These findings are in line with our previous findings in computing education research [10], science education research [14], and engineering education research [37]. This leads us to wonder why some aspects are studied more than the others in our data pool (ESERA, NorDiNa).…”

“…The triangle presents the relationships between the three main actors in the instructional process: the content to be learned, the student and the teacher. The didactic triangle was further developed by Kinnunen [23] and Kinnunen and others [14] to consider the teacher's impact on the student-content relationship, the teacher's self-reflection and the student's feedback (shown as arrows 7 and 8 in Figure 1). In addition, as a part of further development, the didactic triangle was placed in a wider educational scope, so that it enabled the researchers to discuss the instructional processes at the institution, society and international.…”

“…The sub-foci were developed to improve the resolution of the DFCM. The development of the categories that are based on the didactic triangle have been described in more detail in our previous publications [10,11,14,23]. Table 2.…”

“…Our methodological framework is based on the didactic triangle [9] and it has been used successfully to analyze many research papers in computing education [10], engineering education [11], and some venues in science education [12][13][14][15]. The previous findings have clearly indicated that in these areas, research is heavily biased on investigating the relations between students and learning goals/content, such as students' motivation, initial knowledge of the subject domain, learning practice and learning results.…”

“…The goal of this study is to extend the previous analyses in SER by identifying the most and the least studied didactic foci in two important publications venues in Europe and how these relate to other attributes of research, i.e., discipline, the scope of data collection, educational level, teacher education, and applied research methodology. This study is based on the previous analysis of the papers published in the Nordic Studies in Science Education (NorDiNa) journal in the years from 2006 to 2013 [14], which is the leading science education publication in the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden). This paper revealed several interesting findings about the most and the least studied aspects and we became curious about whether similar trends appear more widely in European forums and perhaps beyond.…”