Prospective primary teachers' conceptions about Sciece teaching : ideas resistant to change

Abstract

Our interest in this work is to develop and implement a Likert-scale questionnaire on primary science teaching. We performed a study with a sample of 404 students in Preservice Primary Education enrolled in a Science Methods Course at the University of Seville. To this end, we designed and validated a 6-point Likertscale questionnaire on which the individual prospective teachers expressed their degree of agreement or disagreement with a series of statements about science teaching and learning in Primary Education. In drafting the statements, we took into account two basic referents: (i) the usual level at which our students begin (starting level, as defined by previous studies with small samples), which coincides with a transmissive perspective on science education (Traditional Model); and (ii) the target levels that we consider desirable, consistent with inquiry based science education (Inquiry-Based Model). The results indicated that the prospective teachers were in agreement with inquiry-based science education, although there co-existed deeply rooted traditional ideas.