Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemAn investigation of the impact of LEGO® robotics on the learning of scientific and mathematical concepts at primary level( 2013)This study analysed the way students at grade 3 and 4 learned to manipulate the design projects that are part of lessons from the LEGO® Mindstorms Robotics Invention system. Students worked in cooperative groups of three to four members. Within the hour allocated for each lesson the participants swapped roles, being either a programmer or LEGO® designer. The students were required to utilise many skills, including design, directional language, communication and evaluation. The research methods of the study are qualitative. To find out what the students were learning the research relied on observational notes, written records and photographs. The research aimed to compile evidence of how this style of learning affected the outcomes of student’s achievement and attitudes. Students were required to analyse something that was active. They had to write observational notes to show their understanding of what was occurring and they also had to document how they changed the program to effect the robot’s movements.
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ItemThe dilemmas of junior school science at Caby High School: societal expectations, school structures, student experiences and teacher accounts( 2012)Public claims about the “failure” of science teaching have a 100 year history, which is almost as long as science has existed as a subject in schools. These claims which have evolved to proclamations of a social “crisis” in the post war period have been based in various iterative assertions about the failure of school science to meet its assumed social function to induct young people into a modern scientific structural-economic or functional world view and hence to reproduce a technical class in society. Public discussions of the broader cultural value of science education and scientific humanism, in the education of the person and citizen have been rare. This may be interpreted as a response to the essentially subversive nature of scientific knowledge or the significance of the technical training function that secondary science education is required to perform. Science teaching has been institutionalised as value free, and the skills of science teaching defined in terms of practical epistemologies in various scientific domains. Studies of teachers’ habits of action, of interpretation, of belief and validatory belief have been rare, particularly juxtaposed to the experiences of their students in their classes. Studies of life in science classrooms have attended to teachers or students, rarely both and more rarely even the school as the unit of analysis. Such studies have been small in scale and very poorly funded compared to the numerous formal enquiries into declining enrolments in senior pre-professional subjects in secondary schools. It is a history of social enquiry that seems to be reproduced in each period at the point where the imperfection of the writers’ memory of their experiences in science classrooms meets the past inadequacies of documentation of practice. The current small investigation takes its rise not from an interest in the so called facts about falling enrolments in senior science subjects or to establish a new theory of cause and effect, but from an urge to put together in a new way what everyone knows is there in science classes in the accounts of students and teachers, but not noticed. At Caby High School, an urban, multicultural secondary school, seeking to improve student participation and achievement in secondary education, my three collaborating science teachers and I were not looking for new facts but to better understand what is in plain view to them and their students in their everyday experience in junior science education. In that sense my considerations in this study were not scientific or hypothetical ones, to advance a kind of theory. I have not sought explanations of the supposed “failure” of science teaching in terms of what students fail to accomplish, expect or experience but rather to document what the students’ experiences and expectations are of science classes and how the teachers responded, not directly to the students’ expectations, but in terms of balancing both the social order to which the teachers are retrospectively accountable and the constitutive order in the classroom which requires mutual attention and cooperation. Through the teachers’ dramaturgical interpretation of their day to day practice my brief analyses are aimed at improved understanding of teacher agency in relation to the dilemmas of general science teaching.
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Item"Just because I enjoy it doesn't mean I learn": science teachers' perceptions about students' interest in science( 2011)Producing a scientifically literate citizenry and serving those pupils who wish to continue science in future – balancing between these two aims is a dilemma for compulsory science education. Recent studies have shown post-secondary enrolment in science is declining and is a global issue. These studies have indicated that students’ dissatisfaction with school science is also a common phenomenon in most countries. Concerned with such a scenario, the research for this thesis has explored science teachers’ perceptions of their students’ interest in school science. The study assumed that science teachers develop knowledge about their learners through their teaching experience and that this impacts on their science teaching and ultimately on the apparently common global phenomenon of declining enrolment. In particular, this study examined teachers’ perceptions about their students’ likes and dislikes of science topics and about teaching-learning activities that engage their students. A craft knowledge perspective was used to explore the issue given craft knowledge is an important area of research into teacher knowledge concerned with student engagement. Craft knowledge is a form of teachers’ professional knowledge enabling teaching in context specific situations. Craft knowledge also informs the teacher concerning pedagogy that would interest and engage the students. Experience with learners in the classroom and reflecting on classroom teaching experience is considered to contribute to the development of such knowledge in teachers. Hence, learners were considered in this study as source of knowledge for the teacher. To this end, a qualitative multicase study approach was used to portray a general picture of teachers’ perceptions of their students’ likes and dislikes and of engaging pedagogy. The study compared and contrasted teachers’ perceptions with their students’ responses to interview questions concerning their likes and dislikes of their science lessons. Five teachers from secondary schools in metropolitan area of Melbourne and their students voluntarily participated in this study. The present study identified that the teachers had under-informed views of their students’ likes and dislikes regarding science topics and pedagogical approaches. In particular, when teaching in their areas of expertise, teachers’ strong content knowledge background was often insufficient in terms of capturing student interest, thus indicating teachers’ lack of awareness of engaging pedagogy. Interestingly, some beginning teachers displayed a developing sense of awareness of students’ likes and dislikes gained from their classroom teaching experience although they struggled to use this information to develop engaging teaching approaches. The findings from this study suggest that teacher education programmes should emphasise students as important sources of teacher knowledge that can inform the development of engaging pedagogy.