The Future of Education

The purposes of the study were to investigate the pre-service teacher self-efficacy and performance about inquiry based teaching and learning. In Taiwan, scientific inquiry and operation were emphasized in science teaching and learning according to the new Taiwanese National Curriculum Guideline. Eighty-two pre-service teachers taking the elementary science methods course at the National Metropolitan University participated in the study. The participants completed a sequence of inquiry-based learning activities and learned to define the variables in designing the science activities. They tried to develop the science activities through the processes of comfirmation inquiry, structured inquiry, guided inquiry, and open inquiry. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were applied in this study. This instrument was consulted and validified by ten science researchers. At the end of the  course, the participants did their efforts to exhibit their pedagogical content knowledge in micro-teaching and filled out the questionnaires of scientific inquiry. The questionnaires of scientific inquiry were created by the researchers to measure their interests, attitude, self-efficacy concerning about inquiry-based teaching and learning held by the pre-service teachers. Then, pre-service teachers’ self-efficacies of scientific inquiry were examined and analyzed with statistical methods. Data were collected from the lesson plans, micro-teaching, and feedback from the pre-service teachers. The findings indicated that the pre-service teachers with science major played more active roles in designing, re-modifing the variables of science experiments, and provide convincible explanation to science theories than the pre-service teachers with non-science major. Most of the pre-service teachers with science major exhibited high interests in scientific inquiry learning and teaching. Their performance more easily reached the levels of guided inquiry and open inquiry. However, the pre-service teachers with non-science major used to follow the protocol and did the experiment step by step. They enjoyed science learning through comfirmation inquiry and structured inquiry processes. Meanwhile, they explained science concepts with more narratives and tried to make science easily to understand than the pre-service teachers with science major did. Therefore, in order to nurture the pre-service teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge about scientific inquiry, it is recommended to develop the inquiry based learning activities according to their academic background.

Keywords: Pre-service teachers, self-efficacy, scientific inquiry.

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