Curriculum, learning and teaching
Science is not scary Briony Taylor introduces a case study of teacher attitudes towards science in the context of the IB Primary Years Programme From 2006 to 2011 I was the primary school science teacher at a bilingual school in Switzerland. Hands-on science was used as a platform to help the non-Anglophone students learn English in a fun and authentic way. In this role, I very quickly remembered why I love science and I realised how important science education is. I witnessed first-hand how motivated students can be when they engage with science. They are inspired to learn how to think, solve problems and make informed decisions, just like scientists do. Being a passionate science educator, I wanted other primary school teachers to enjoy teaching science as much as I did. The positive association between teachers’ attitudes towards teaching and students’ attitudes toward learning is well recognised, in science as in other areas of the curriculum. If teacher attitudes play a role in teaching and learning, consideration of these attitudes is therefore essential for understanding and improving education. I also wondered what was the best way to teach science. Many research projects have documented the failures of traditional methods of teaching science, while many others have favoured the more modern approach of teaching science through inquiry. Despite these findings, a majority of primary science teachers still use a textbook-based, contentacquisition approach to science education (Tenaw, 2014), while studies by Harlen and Holroyd (1997) demonstrated that instructors with low confidence and low content knowledge might rely heavily on kits and teach science very prescriptively by having students follow step-by-step instructions. In 2015, for my final dissertation as part of a Master’s degree, I investigated teacher attitudes towards science in the context of the International Baccalaureate Primary Years
Programme (PYP), motivated by three research questions: (1) What are the attitudes of PYP teachers towards science in the context of the PYP? (2) Can PYP teachers identify any unique challenges or advantages to teaching science in the context of the PYP? (3) How often are PYP teachers teaching science to their students? I chose to ground my research in the PYP because it is an inquiry-based, concept-based, transdisciplinary curriculum that states that science must also be taught as a way of thinking. This is very much in line with how current research suggests children best learn science. I used a case study approach with 18 international school teachers. I created a theoretical framework for assessing attitudes by adapting a model proposed by van AalderenSmeets and Walma van der Molen (2013). The framework was made up of seven aspects: perceived relevance, perceived difficulty, gender bias, enjoyment, anxiety, self-efficacy and context dependency, and was used as the basis of a questionnaire to assess teachers’ attitudes towards science in the PYP. Although with only 18 participants the findings cannot be generalised to other contexts beyond the case study school, I hoped that the results would be interesting to other teachers and would provide some ideas for their own context. Overall the participants in this study held a positive attitude towards the four key aspects of the PYP (inquiry, concept-based, transdisciplinary, science as a way of thinking). The vast majority of participants perceived these methods of teaching science as relevant and made clear that they enjoy teaching in these ways. Only a small number of participants perceived the PYP science teaching methods as difficult, felt anxious teaching in these ways and had low perceived selfefficacy (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Attitudes towards science in context of the PYP Winter
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| 2018
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