Protección anticaída CRITERIOS DE SELECCIÓN

As part of Learning Cycle 1, PTs participated in 5 three-hour workshops. In line with our local instruction theory, PTs first carried out and then critiqued inquiry-based activities designed for the Junior Cycle Science classroom. A four-step analysis framework was developed. Through an iterative process relevant quotes from the critiques were selected individually by a team of four researchers on a group-by-group, week-by-week basis. In-depth discussion of the initial claims made by the individual researchers allowed us to first revise the claims, and then reduce them to a set of summary claims representative of the entire cohort of PTs on a week-by-week basis. Final claims were arrived at by reconsidering the summary claims in the light of the PTs’ Professional Vision elicited in other weeks. This analysis of the PTs’ critiques of these activities, which were mostly guided in nature, allowed us to make claims about the PTs’ Professional Vision of IBSE.

In an Irish context, this study was the first of its kind to explore in depth the

Professional Vision of PTs, though other studies have looked at the development of Irish PTs in terms of their PCK (Lehane, 2016). Like Lehane, we found that PTs had a superficial understanding of the goals of IBSE. We found that they were able to

highlight some important aspects of IBSE, but rarely did evidence emerge of PTs giving deeper meaning to these highlighted aspects. We found that PTs classified science

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teaching in three broad ways: rote learning, guided inquiry and open inquiry. By the end of Learning Cycle 1, the PTs’ Professional Vision indicated a strong focus on the

correctness of students’ knowledge and procedures. These results were similar to results reported in existing literature, and it is reassuring that we obtained a similar picture by using a different technique (experiencing and critiquing inquiry activities compared to e.g. video analysis). Although the existing literature reported on PTs in different cultures, the challenges they faced when learning about IBSE were similar to what we found in an Irish context (e.g. Crawford, 2007); Lotter, Harwood, & Bonner, 2007)).

Design Cycle 1 also served to inform the development of Cycle 2. The results allowed us to transition from mostly probing our PTs’ Professional Vision to also trying to broaden and shape it.

6.1.2 Design Cycle 2

In Learning Cycle 2, PTs again took part in 5 three-hour workshops. Three of the workshops from Cycle 1 were retained, but the first two workshops were replaced. The first of these new workshops allowed PTs to experience a new university-level physics topic through guided inquiry. The PTs critiqued this activity in the same way as they did the Junior Cycle activities. In this way, we aimed to let PTs experience the process of learning through IBSE, which allowed us to broaden their Apprenticeship of

Observation. This in turn enabled us to investigate if the focus on correct knowledge and procedures was a direct result of their Apprenticeship of Observation up to that point.

In the second new workshop, PTs carried out an open inquiry activity that was suitable for use at both university and Junior Cycle level. In the first part of this Pressure

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second part of this workshop, they analysed video clips from an Irish classroom in which the topic of pressure was taught over 9 classes. This series of classes started with the same video the PTs had watched, but the classes following this were adapted and activities designed as the need arose. PTs watched 50 minutes of edited footage from this series of classes and reflected on this video footage.

As a learning cycle, this iteration of the DBR was deemed an improvement since it introduced the PTs to new aspects of IBSE – learning material for the first time through IBSE, and a vicarious experience of an open inquiry class. As a research cycle however, this iteration turned out to be important mostly as a precursor to Design Cycle 3.

6.1.3 Design Cycle 3

Design Cycle 3 was split into two research cycles, Cycle 3A and Cycle 3B. The learning trajectory for Cycle 3 was similar to that of Cycle 2, the only difference being that a continuous half-hour video of teaching based on the same phenomenon, but taught in a US classroom, was used. In Learning Cycle 3, the PTs were able to experience and reflect on inquiry, along with being able to learn new content through inquiry. They also got to experience teaching through inquiry vicariously through the use of video footage.

The aim of Research Cycle 3A was to examine the highlighting and coding practices of groups of PTs as they analysed video footage of an open inquiry activity in the

classroom. Five themes that were commonly highlighted as good teaching or important student ideas were found. On the one hand, we found that the PTs generally highlighted sensible episodes, but rarely give evidence of if and how they coded these episodes. On the other hand, almost all groups showed an emerging appreciation of the collaborative nature of constructing knowledge in open inquiry, and some groups evaluated the quality of some of the students’ statements. This suggests that video analysis helps elicit

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that some PTs are developing the ability to think like an IBSE-oriented teacher in a constructivist classroom, as found in the literature e.g. by Sherin & van Es (2005) for US pre-service mathematics teachers. I found that the coding and highlighting by groups of PTs from an Irish university and those from a US research university were broadly similar. This suggests that despite some likely minor differences in school cultures between the two countries, the Apprenticeship of Observation PTs bring to a university course is broadly similar. This is in agreement with the literature, which finds that science teaching and learning in most “western” countries is quite similar and faces similar challenges (see e.g. Rocard et al. (2007) and the US National Research Council (2000)).

Research Cycle 3B investigated if it was possible to characterise the discourse of a group of PTs as they participated in an open inquiry activity. To this end a new framework combining argumentation, sense-making and transactivity was developed. This new framework allows us to characterise most aspects of PTs’ discourse, unlike previous frameworks such as TAP (Erduran et al., 2004) which were designed to look at argumentation only. Furthermore, within this new analysis framework we found that the construction of discourse matrices comprising six elements of discourse and six types of transactivity helped establish similarities and differences between different episodes of student discourse. We found that episodes in which similar fractions of discourse were devoted to particular elements of discourse and transactivity correspond to similar types of sense making and developing scientific understanding. Moreover, we were able to ascertain that non-argument-related elements of discourse such as prompts and clarifications were of great importance in keeping discourse going, especially when linking together different physics concepts and trying understanding a scenario, which would likely not attract much interest in a purely argumentation-based framework such as Toulmin’s Argumentation Pattern (Erduran, Simon and Osborne, 2004). Finally, we

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found that in a teaching setting quite similar to a typical classroom situation, in which a teacher can visit each groups for perhaps three relatively short periods of time, the PTs were able to make significant headway in constructing knowledge that was getting close to the normative understanding.