ABSTRACT
The immersion of digital technologies in the initial training of Natural Sciences teachers has become even more complex since the beginning of the Covid-19 Pandemic. In this sense, the present study proposed to analyze how digital technologies are present in the training of Natural Sciences teachers. For this, 15 semi-structured interviews were carried out and an online questionnaire was applied to teachers and students of the Biology, Chemistry and Physics subprojects of the Pedagogical Residency Program/Capes (RP/Capes) of the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). Based on the principles of Critical Discourse Analysis, the reports identified difficulties in problematizing training with digital technologies, in view of the need to restructure the curricular matrices of the degrees, in addition to the already rooted instrumental training of future teachers. In this way, it is essential to expand the promotion of initial teacher training programs, such as PR, regarding the need to remove the instrumentalizing perspective that limits dialogue with technologies, making actions attentive to the potential of such digital spaces. © 2023 Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Instituto de Fisica. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
In recent years, science teaching and learning has been changed from onsite to online activity since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. This situation affects students familiar with the online classroom. Regarding this situation, science teachers design their lessons with a combination of onscreen learning activities. In addition, digital boardgame has been recognized as an educational tool for motivating and engaging students in learning science concepts. In this study, we explored students' attraction toward digital boardgame while they participated in the board game. To examine students' experiences with the digital board game for learning the energy conversion concept, we used eye tracking software and hardware of the Tobii eye tracker to collect their eye behavior while they were playing the digital board game. The data collected from eye tracking was analyzed to reveal students' attraction. Data collection was carried out with 6 K-12 education students. The result of student attraction toward digital board game is discussed in this article. © 2023 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
This article presents in a comparative way the findings from two surveys conducted on primary (students in Y6) and secondary (students in Y10) students in Attica, Greece, in order to map their views on distance science education, which was emergently implemented due to the COVID-19 outbreak during the school year 2020–2021. The research was conducted in a sample of 378 primary and 197 secondary students. The findings revealed that students were not satisfied with the distance teaching and learning of science, either in primary or in secondary education, except for the increased use of audiovisual material. Technical issues, such as poor network and infrastructure, lack of face-to-face interaction with classmates and teacher, external and internal distractions, lack of sufficient experimental activities, and limited understanding of concepts were common findings in both levels of education. Concerning the differences between the levels, it seems that in primary education more technical problems were reported, while in secondary education more didactic problems were reported.
ABSTRACT
We examine the impact of implementing active pedagogical method-ologies in three successive data science courses for a biology curriculum at the University of Mons, Belgium. Blended learning and ipped classroom ap-proaches were adopted, with an emphasis on project-based biological data anal-ysis. Four successive types of exercises of increasing dificulties were proposed to the students. Tutorials written with the R package learnr were identified as a critical step to transition between theory and the application of the con-cepts. The cognitive workload needed to complete the learnr tutorials was measured for the three courses and it was only lower for the last course, sug-gesting students needed a long time to get used to their software environment (R, RStudio and git). Data relative to students' activity, collected primar-ily from the ongoing assessment, were also used to establish student pro_les according to their learning strategies. Several suboptimal strategies were ob-served and discussed. Finally, the timing of students contributions, and the intensity of teacher-learner interactions related to these contributions were an-alyzed before, during and after the mandatory distance learning due to the COVID-19 lockdown. A lag phase was visible at the beginning of the first lockdown, but the students' work was not markedly affected during the second lockdown period which lasted much longer. © 2023 Sociedad Espanola de Investigacion Osea y del Metabolismo Mineral (SEIOMM). All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Scholars note that teacher preparation is a critical part of addressing equity and justice in K-12 school settings (Goodwin & Darity, 2019;Kretchmar & Zeichner, 2016;Zeichner et al., 2016). However, despite efforts to make teacher education programs more equitable and diverse, many continue to underprepare preservice teachers to center social justice and meet the academic needs of culturally and racially diverse students (Mensah, 2021) and inequity and racism persist in teacher education (Kohli, 2022). Therefore, it remains crucial to investigate how preservice teachers in teacher education programs can gain experience in learning how to enact teaching that decenters whiteness, fosters criticality, fosters rigorous scientific learning, provides a context which values the epistemologies of diverse cultures, and supports students in working to change social inequities (Ladson-Billings, 2000;Trigos-Carrillo & Rogers, 2017).The need for social justice teacher education is perhaps even more critical for preservice teachers of STEM subjects, as justice-centered discourses are often absent from science and mathematics classrooms and teacher education contexts (Rodriguez, 2015). Science preservice teachers who make socially just science instruction the foundation of their classrooms adopt curriculum that is academically rigorous and relevant to students (Ladson-Billings, 2020), teach students about the historically racist and inequitable aspects of science practices and products (Morales-Doyle, 2017), and also teach that science is a critical tool in alleviating equity and social justice issues. In this study, I utilized a multiple case study design to examine a science teacher educator and a cohort of preservice secondary science teachers' understandings and enactments of justice-centered science pedagogy (Morales-Doyle, 2017). Justice-centered science pedagogy engages students in academically rigorous learning based on social and environmental justice issues. The three domains of this framework are antiracist and equitable science education, social justice science issues, and youth as transformative intellectuals. Using semi-structured interviews, observations, and content analysis of their course website, data were gathered over the course of the yearlong program to understand the teacher educator and preservice teachers' opportunities to learn about justice-centered science pedagogy, as well as the ways that they were actually taking this work up. Results from this study demonstrate that the pandemic created limitations to the enactment of justice-centered science pedagogy, and that while preservice teachers reported focusing on academics, eliciting student ideas, framing students as producers of knowledge and culture, and prioritized building positive relationships with students, few reported utilizing social justice science issues in their science lessons. Implications from this study offer that explicit instruction and professional learning communities in both reform-based and justice-centered science practices can prepare preservice teachers to more fully enact justice-centered science teaching. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)
ABSTRACT
Within-semester shifts in course modality in response to pandemics, weather, or accommodation for travel and health are increasingly common and can interrupt student learning. We tracked temporary modality changes across 10 sections of "Introduction to American Government” to examine the extent to which instructors have tools to help students successfully navigate such changes and mitigate learning loss. We find that students rated instructors' handling of shifts well if they made course material engaging, communicated clearly, and effectively used technology. The analysis suggests that instructors can mitigate the impact of unplanned changes to modality on students' learning when there are three or fewer shifts during a semester.
ABSTRACT
This study contributes to description of teaching changes resulting from COVID-19 epidemic. It focuses on online teaching of practical exercises in science subjects from pupils' and teachers' perspectives. Views on the distance learning of practical exercises were obtained from Czech lower-secondary school pupils (n=543) and science teachers (n=24). Most teachers conducted science practicum classes using a combination of synchronous and asynchronous methods and rated support from school management as rather adequate. Teachers assigned fewer hands-on activities, specifically experiments, observations, and activities resulting in a product, in distance teaching than in face-to-face lessons, although they rated them as the most useful. Pupils found experimentation and observation to be the most interesting and useful, followed by activities that result in a product (e.g., herbarium). Pupils generally preferred the present form of practical activities.
ABSTRACT
Moonshot is the redesign of NASA's High School Aerospace Scholars (HAS), which traditionally engaged Texas high school juniors in a 16-week online course for credit and an intense week-long onsite experience working in teams with experts at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC). Due to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), our challenge was to design, develop, and deliver an online virtual experience to replace the all-expenses-paid six-day residential summer experience at JSC where HAS participants traditionally work with like-minded peers and NASA experts on authentic design challenges.
ABSTRACT
We examine the impact of implementing active pedagogical methodologies in three successive data science courses for a biology curriculum at the University of Mons, Belgium. Blended learning and flipped classroom approaches were adopted, with an emphasis on project-based biological data analysis. Four successive types of exercises of increasing difficulties were proposed to the students. Tutorials written with the R package learnr were identified as a critical step to transition between theory and the application of the concepts. The cognitive workload needed to complete the learnr tutorials was measured for the three courses and it was only lower for the last course, suggesting students needed a long time to get used to their software environment (R, RStudio and git). Data relative to students' activity, collected primarily from the ongoing assessment, were also used to establish student profiles according to their learning strategies. Several suboptimal strategies were observed and discussed. Finally, the timing of students contributions, and the intensity of teacher-learner interactions related to these contributions were analyzed before, during and after the mandatory distance learning due to the COVID-19 lockdown. A lag phase was visible at the beginning of the first lockdown, but the students' work was not markedly affected during the second lockdown period which lasted much longer.
ABSTRACT
In this text, we presented some analyzes and reflections on a Didactic Sequence developed with 25 high school students from a federal public institution, located in the Brazilian Midwest, during the period of Remote Education are presented. We opted for an adaptation of the Flipped Classroom (SAI, in Portuguese), alternating asynchronous moments in the Virtual Learning Environment with synchronous moments, through Google Meet. We work on dialogic strategies, aiming at student protagonism, based on forums and questions about the relationship between the veracity of information and scientific criteria. The students were instructed to seek reasons for the news broadcast referring to the new Coronavirus, Sars-Cov-2. From the research carried out, it was possible to infer that the structured didactic sequence allowed the creation of spaces for dialogicity, triggering actions of clash of ideas, refuting and arguing unreliable information and also enabling academic production (for example, some presentations to other students), on the part of students.
ABSTRACT
It is a challenge to carry out science lessons with experiments both in the conditions that emerged with the COVID-19 pandemic and in schools where there is a shortage of laboratories and materials. This study aims to examine the proficiency and opinions of pre-service primary teachers (PPTs) pertaining to performing hands-on science experiments with simple tools. This case study was carried out with 47 PPTs selected according to the convenient sampling method. Data sources included video recordings of the experiments performed by the PPTs over ten weeks and an open-ended questionnaire. The videos were analyzed with the analytical rubric and presented with descriptive statistics. The open-ended questions were analyzed with content analysis. Results showed that PPTs are sufficient for choosing suitable simple tools for experiments and for applying the experiments gradually, extensively, and correctly, while they need to develop in explaining the concepts and information correctly. In addition, the majority of the PPTs stated that they did not have any difficulties whilst performing the experiments, they could perform science experiments with simple tools, the experiments would reflect positively on the learning outcomes of the students, and they could conduct science lessons with experiments using simple tools and alternative materials, even if there is no laboratory in the school. Future studies should focus on increasing the proficiency of PPTs to give scientific explanations for experiments. © 2022, Ozgen Korkmaz. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected educational institutions around the world. One partial solution for students and teachers to continue the academic process involved the use of software and hardware technologies via the internet. The main objective of this research was to analyze the actions carried out by computer science teachers (and teachers who taught related degrees) in Sinaloa, Mexico, during the COVID-19 confinement period, to determine if the working conditions were different at all educational institutions. Based on quantitative, descriptive-explanatory, correlational, field, and cross-sectional approaches to data collection-a survey was designed and sent to teachers who taught classes in computer science and related careers. The results showed that although teachers felt prepared in designing and implementing virtual courses (90.73%), 68.5% believed that virtual classes were not enough for students (i.e., regarding replacing the training being offered). Likewise, teachers observed that only 27.8% of their students showed real commitment to online classes. In the hypothesis test, a chi-squared value of 3.84 was obtained, with a significance (p-value) of 0.137. There was a probability of error of 13.7%; this is high, considering that the level of significance must be 0.05 (5%) or less. It was concluded that teachers must be permanently trained in the use of new digital technologies; in addition, they must continuously produce academic material and make it available to the educational community. It is necessary for universities to design plans for the regulated use of applications and devices for academic purposes, update study plans and programs, and train teachers and students beyond conventional education.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , COVID-19/epidemiology , Cross-Sectional Studies , Humans , Pandemics , Students , UniversitiesABSTRACT
The shift to distance learning has created unique perspectives and challenges to educational stakeholders specifically among teachers who are tasked with keeping teaching and learning on track despite their professional, technical, and personal concerns, and inadequate familiarity to the new learning modality. While these realities have been challenging the capability of teachers, they also open the doors for opportunities of levelling up to a new education landscape and harnessing potentials which may be useful for the furtherance of the teaching practices. The present qualitative study aims to document Science teachers’ perspectives, challenges and opportunities in the teaching of Science courses during the pandemic. It consists of the various insights, initiatives, coping strategies and actions, and opportunities of eight Filipino Science teachers towards securing a responsive and efficient learning management in the midst of the unforeseen challenges in the education sector brought by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. © 2022, North American Business Press. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic shows that schools must adapt new approaches in order to continue to provide teaching and learning at schools. To achieve this, students must be equipped to learn in a multifaceted, multitasking, and technology-driven world, and the utilization of Web 2.0 tools has been revealed as important in this endeavor. The aim of this study is to introduce an educational website enriched with Web 2.0 tools designed for science teaching and in addition to show the effect on achievement and motivation. Therefore, the effect of an educational website supported by Web 2.0 tools on achievement and motivation was investigated in a quasi-experimental design with a pretest-posttest control group. The unit of “Force and Energy” was presented through an educational website enriched by Web 2.0 tools. The positive effects of using the website on the achievement and motivation of the students in the results brought to mind the use of an educational website supported by Web 2.0 tools as an alternative or support to online training during the COVID-19 pandemic. © 2022 IGI Global. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The years of 2020 and 2021 are being atypical for the development of educational activities as it had been proposed until then. All states in Brazil have declared a general pandemic with the suspension of face-to-face classes sometime in the first semester of 2020. To adapt to this situation, several institutions was proposing remote activities. In some institutions, such activities were implemented immediately and in others, after a transition period. Especially those who have no tradition in distance learning needed this moment of transition to define the model of remote activities to be followed. Thus, in this period, one can analyze the best methodologies and those that present the most significant results in student learning. This paper analyzes four possibilities of methodologies studied during the transition period and verifies their suitability to the learning reality of undergraduate and bachelor's students in Chemistry at the State University of Ponta Grossa (UEPG).