New Perspectives in Science Education

One of the challenges of science education is to train future teachers in methodologies that enable the construction of scientific knowledge in their students (Alabay, 2009). One way of achieving this is experiencing these methodologies first-hand to analyse, as students, different aspects such as the knowledge learning, the difficulties in their implementation, or the emotions felt during the project (Olibie et al., 2015; Martín-Gámez et al., 2020). This work presents an experience with 58 Pre-service Primary Education teachers taking the subject of Science Education in the third year of this degree at the University of Malaga (Spain), whose main objective was that they actively experimented with and evaluated the corner-based methodology applied to learning scientific knowledge. Corners are delimited spaces in the classroom where students, individually or in small groups, carry out different learning activities. This methodology is common in early childhood education and is diluted in the primary stage, so it should continue to be promoted. The activity was developed in three stages. First, the students created a corner on scientific knowledge and present it to their classmates as an educational fair. Secondly, students had to improve the corner activities with the knowledge they acquired in the subject. Finally, they must present improved corners at a second fair. Initially, the activities in the science corners were mainly centred on a traditional methodology. However, the final situation was different, presenting much-improved corners with spaces where those who visited them were the protagonists driving their learning. To assess progress in their perceptions of the science learning achieved and the emotions felt, students completed a questionnaire before and after the activity. It is possible to appreciate a progress in comparing responses between the two moments regarding the perception of the learning of scientific knowledge experienced by the participants. Thus, most seem to know little about the subject in the initial corners. In contrast, they perceived much scientific knowledge in the final corners, or so much that they would feel able to explain it to someone else. Concerning emotions, the future teachers were initially interested (35.5%) and concentrated (23.0%) on their participation in the science corners. However, while they showed similar interest after the activity (29.0%), the final emotions were greater satisfaction (17.1%) and concentration (31.4%). Funding: Project PID2019-105765GA-I00.