New Perspectives in Science Education

Edition 13

Accepted Abstracts

Grade Three Teachers’ Attitudes towards the Teaching of Science and their Understanding of Science and Science Process Skills.

Monde Kazeni, University of Johannesburg (South Africa)

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate grade 3 teachers’ attitudes towards the teaching of science in early primary education, and their understanding of the concept of science and science process skills. According to Shulman (1987), Content Knowledge (CK) is one of the requirements for effective teaching. Teachers with inadequate knowledge of science content and science process skills are not likely to teach the subject in a way that would enable learners to understand the subject. Literature suggests that most early primary school (foundation phase) teachers lack the basic science knowledge required to introduce learners to the field of science, and to motivate them in the study of science (Beni, Stears & James, 2012; Winston, 2018). Appleton (2012) stated that teachers’ content knowledge affects their confidence to teach science. Confident teachers are likely to be more enthusiastic and positive when teaching the content that they are familiar with (Beni, Stears & James, 2012). In this regard, Ualesi and Ward (2018) indicated that teachers’ attitudes towards the teaching of science could influence their learners’ achievement and motivation in the study of science. There is limited literature on early primary school teachers’ attitudes towards the teaching of science and their knowledge of the concept of science and science process skills, in South Africa. Therefore, this study used qualitative semi-structured interviews, to collect data from four purposively sampled grade 3 teachers, regarding their attitudes towards the teaching of science and their understanding of science and science process skills. The findings revealed that the participating teachers lacked training in teaching science, they had mostly negative attitudes towards the teaching of science at early primary school, and they had a superficial understanding of the concept of science and science process skills. These findings are disturbing, given the fact that early primary school science is envisaged to lie the foundation for learning science at higher educational levels. The findings have implications on the training of early primary school (Foundation Phase) teachers.

Keywords: Science, education, primary, attitudes, science process skills;

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