Taking into Account Advanced Science Students’ Scientific Literacy and Achievement Levels in Explicit Embedded Reflective Instruction

Author(s):

Mustafa Köksal(presenting / submitting)Jale Cakıroglu Omer Geban

Conference:

ECER 2013

Network:

27. Didactics - Learning and Teaching

Format:

Paper

Session Information

27 SES 04 A, Students' Achievements (miscellaneous)

Paper Session

Time:

2013-09-11

09:00-10:30

Room:

A-204

Chair:

Helmut Johannes Vollmer

Contribution

In order to promote informed understandings of nature of science (NOS) as a major component of scientific literacy, explicit-reflective teaching approach in which certain aspects of NOS are incorporated into science content courses has been shown to be effective and suggested by many researchers (Akerson, Abd-El-Khalick & Lederman, 2000). However, in intervention studies on NOS (e.g. Khishfe & Lederman, 2007; Akerson, Buzzelli & Dunnelly, 2008), scientific literacy as an higher-order variable has not been explicitly assessed in spite of their clear indication of importance of scientific literacy in their theoretical frameworks. In addition, science content knowledge (achievement) of students, as one side of scientific literacy, should also be considered in an intervention as a component of scientific literacy. Science content also provides a context to apply NOS aspects in science learning environments and knowing the scientific theories, laws and concepts are pre-requisite to discuss and reflect on NOS aspects. In the present study cell and cellular organization unit was selected as science content to improve scientific literacy because it is a type of rich subject matter in studying NOS aspects. This unit includes many topics in which some of the nature of science aspects can be embedded such as change of cell theory (tentativeness), differences in membrane models (subjectivity) and difference in microscopic livings and their compartments (observation and inference). In sum, there is a need to implement the EER teaching by explicitly assessing scientific liteacy level and considering science content to establish more comprehensive teaching strategy.

As another important point in the literature of explicit-reflective NOS teaching, the majority of the studies using the explicit-reflective instruction were conducted with pre-service teachers (Akerson, Abd-El-Khalick & Lederman, 2000; Kucuk, 2008). However, there is lack of studies conducted on special high school students called as advanced science students. They are special cases for NOS studies due to their experience differences and exposure to more science content and assessment situations. These students generally take more science courses and therefore they are more experienced with science content than common students. Again, they are selected to science high schools and the programmes including more science content by special tests on science content. They are at the top of the distribution of students taking science content tests (Turkish Ministry of Education, 2007). In addition, these students will probably have high status to make important decisions for other people due to their success in science content and they are also future citizens in the society, so they should be studied in terms of ‘scientific literacy and NOS’ as well as other students.

Considering all of the points aforementioned above, the purpose of the present study was to investigate the effectiveness of the explicit-embedded-reflective (EER) NOS instruction on scientific literacy levels and content knowledge of ninth grade advanced science students about ‘cell and cellular organization’ subject.

Method

For the purpose of the study, comparison group pretest-posttest design was used with quantitative data collection tools (Fraenkel & Wallen, 2006). This study included 51 ninth grade academically advanced science students (15 years old) enrolling in two different intact classes of a Science High School where students have more time and dense content for science courses than other types of high schools (6 course-times per week for ninth grades, 12 course-times per week for tenth, eleventh and twelfth grades). Advanced science students in the country are selected according to their results of a nation-wide examination. Data were collected through two instruments: Nature of Science Literacy Test (NSLT) (Wenning; 2006) and Cell Content Knowledge Test (CCKT). For the analysis of data in this study, paired sample t-tests and independent t-tests were used. To test effectiveness of the methods for both groups separately, paired samples t-tests on two dependent variables (content knowledge (achievement) and scientific literacy level) were conducted by considering each group as a unit of analysis while independent t-tests were used to compare two groups. To keep 0.05 alpha level constant throughout the analyses, Benforroni adjustment was conducted and so 0.006 was set as alpha.

Expected Outcomes

Independent t-tests were conducted to compare the groups’ pre-test and post-test scores on the dependent variables separately. There were no statistically significant differences in the pre-test scores of comparison and treatment group participants in terms of both achievement and scientific literacy (p>0.006). However, the results of the independent t-tests showed that there were statistically significant differences between the post-test scores of the participants in treatment and comparison groups in terms of content knowledge (p<0.006). The effect size value regarding the difference was large. The difference was in favour of the participants of treatment group. The results of paired samples t-tests showed that there were statistically significant differences between pre and post-test scores of the participants in treatment group in terms of both content knowledge (large effect) and scientific literacy (medium effect) (p<0.006). However, there were no statistically significant differences in pre- and post-test scores of comparison group participants in terms of both content knowledge and scientific literacy (p>0.006). Getting elaboration opportunity on the science content knowledge during the teaching on scientific literacy aspects might have increased achievement levels (Sahari, 1997) and also discussion and reflection components might have contributed to increase in scientific literacy levels (Lee, 2007; Millar, 2006).

References

Akerson, V., Buzzelli, C.A., & Donnelly, L.A. (2008). Early childhood teachers' views of nature of science: The influence of intellectual levels, cultural values, and explicit reflective teaching. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 45(6), 748-770. Akerson, V. L., Abd-El-Khalick, F. S., & Lederman, N. G. (2000). The influence of a reflective activity-based approach on elementary teachers' conceptions of the nature of science. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 37(4), 295-317. Fraenkel, J.R. & Wallen, N.E. (2003). How to design and evaluate research in education, (5th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing. Khishfe, R. & Lederman, N. (2007). Relationship between instructional context and understandings of nature of science. International Journal of Science Education, 29(8), 939-961. Kucuk, M. (2008). Improving preservice elementary teachers’ views of the nature of science using explicit reflective teaching in a science, technology and society course. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 33(2),16-40 Lee, Y. C. (2007). Developing decision-making skills for socio-scientific issues. Journal of Biological Education, 41(4), 170-176 Millar, R. (2006). Twenty first century science: Insights from the design and implementation of a scientific literacy approach in school science. International Journal of Science Education, 28(13), 1499-1521. Sahari, M. (1997). Elaboration as a text-processing strategy: A meta-analytic review. RELC Journal, 28(1), 15-27. Turkish Ninth Grade Biology Curriculum (2007). Turkish Ministry of Education. Ankara. Wenning, C. J. (2006). Assessing inquiry skills as a component of scientific literacy. Journal Physics Teacher Education Online, 4(2), 21-24

Author Information

Mustafa Köksal (presenting / submitting)

Inonu University

Department of Science Education

Malatya

Jale Cakıroglu

Middle East Technical University

Omer Geban