New Perspectives in Science Education

According to the UNESCC’s Global Monitoring Report, the recent findings have shown that undesirable teaching practices, such as, a rigid, chalk-and-talk, teacher-centered, or lecture-driven pedagogy, persist in Sub-Saharan Africa. In these countries, educational policy documents often encourage the use of student-centered teaching and learning in science. However, it is said that how student-centered teaching and learning actually looks like in the science classrooms has not been well-discussed and some teachers in the countries believe that all the science lessons with hands-on activities are student-centered. Thus, it is important to investigate learning process of children and develop some means that can help the teachers to visualize student-centered lessons.

The purpose of this study is to develop a lesson analysis system that helps the teachers to visualize student-centered teaching in the science classrooms. When it comes to educational development, as Lewin^[1] pointed out, it is important to pay attention to the educational context of the locality. Accordingly, when developing the lesson analysis system, this study focused on Zambia as a country in Sub-Saharan Africa and the context of its science education was taken into consideration. Specifically, the development process involved observing discourses of 50 science lessons and analyzing 12 science lessons of grade 9 classes there aiming to identify an unique characteristics of the teaching practices in the region.

The developed lesson analysis system has two major features; the category system and the unit for coding. The category system focuses on students’ responses in the classroom discourse, reflecting the characteristics of the teaching practices. It has been designed to provide information about if a segment of teaching and learning activity in a lesson is student-centered, based on the level of students’ involvement from the viewpoint of social constructivism. The highest category includes student’s responses against other students’ utterances.The unit for coding that this lesson analysis system uses is move, a set of a teacher’s question and a student’s response to the question. It should be noticed that although there are several definitions of move, this research has adapted Fujii’s definition ^[2]. Coding moves and analyzing the flow of moves in a lesson make it possible to visualize a lesson in a simple way.

The developed lesson analysis system is expected to work as a simple tool for the teachers to realize what is student-centered in the science classrooms.

[1] Lewin K.M. (1993). “Planning policy on science education in developing countries”, International Journal of Science Education 15(1): 1-15.

[2] Fujii T. (1983). “Sansuuka Niokeru Hatsumonbunseki Nitsuiteno Ichikousatsu”, Journal of Japan Society for Mathematical Education 65(10): 187-198. (In Japanese)