Chinese And American Science Teachers' Understanding Of Inquiry And Inquiry-Based Teaching

As a core topic of international K-12 science education field, scientific inquiry is leading the reform in classroom teaching. However, the topic of teachers' understanding of scientific inquiry still lacks systematic research, which needs research paradigm in both theory and practice, especially the cross-culture research. Therefore, this dissertation is focused on Chinese and American science teachers' understanding of inquiry and inquiry-based teaching, which explores standard-based teaching by reviewing the history and theory of inquiry development. Then the author uses concurrent mixed methods approaches to draw a conclusion from different kinds of understanding between Chinese and American science teachers, finding the relationships between teachers' understanding and their practice by analyzing American ICAN Project. The author suggests practice-reflection model of inquiry-based teaching for teachers' training in our country, which is based on knowledge about inquiry. The construction of theory and exploration in practice informs and enhances each other. The main purpose of this dissertation is to provide new ways and methodological guidance for the research on science teachers' understandings of scientific inquiry and inquiry-based teaching.The dissertation includes six chapters.In the first chapter, the author defines its history and basic conceptions, making a history review, reflecting some related theories, which consists of scientific literacy, teachers' knowledge and belief. This chapter is the definition and summary of conceptions and theories for the entire dissertation.The research of inquiry-based teaching and content standard is discussed in Chapter 2, which is guided by American science education standard when reviewing the history of science education reform. Furthermore the author reviews the research of teaching as inquiry which consists of implementation and evaluation.Chapter 3 is driven by the research of science education standard, systematically analyzing the research from understandings of nature of science to scientific inquiry, which is the core fields of scientific epistemology, including the research content and internal methodological logic in an epistemological perspective, and they are the guidance for empirical research of the dissertation.Chapter 4 turns to the empirical investigation of this dissertation, using concurrent mixed methods approaches to investigate science teachers' understanding of scientific inquiry, and the author concludes that there are significant differences between their understandings on specific topics, and Chinese teachers are in the traditional phase, American in the traditional to informed phase. There are six types of teachers' understanding of scientific inquiry, which are fixed procedure, subject knowledge, inquiry skills, subject idea, situated cognition and cognitive ability, and the first two types are maily held by Chinese teachers, the last two by American teachers. Teachers' understanding of nature of science has relationship with inquiry, and nature of science is dominant in Chinese teachers' understanding, but American teachers are not. Chinese teachers also have some myth understandings of important topics about scientific inquiry.Based on the inquiry-based teaching videos, Chapter 5 conducts an investigation on science teachers' understanding of inquiry-based teaching, and concludes that there are significant differences between their understanding of doing inquiry, and Chinese teachers tend to emphasize how to do experiment. They also have differences in dominant factors for their evaluation of the inquiry-based teaching and there are five different types including demonstration-lecture, skills practice, experiment design, situated cognition and open inquiry, which have relationships with their practice. Chinese teachers tend to emphasize demonstration-lecture and skills practice, and American teachers emphasize situated cognition and open inquiry. There are significant differences between their practice and achievement of three-dimensional objectives of science curriculum.A case study is conducted which covers 1CAN teacher training program in United States at the last chapter, and the author describes the procedure of this program, which is analyzed by pre and post test for the improvement of teachers' scientific understandings and its relationship with teacher knowledge and classroom teaching.Based on the work of differences in understanding and the analysis of American teachers' training program, the author suggests concurrent model of inquiry content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge, to learn inquiry by doing through practice and reflection.