Enriching primary student teachers’ conceptions about science teaching: Towards dialogic inquirybased teaching

2012

Inquiry-based teaching has been at the heart of science education since it was first outlined in national standards over a decade ago. The general idea behind the inquiry guidelines is that pupils would adopt ways of conducting science, in addition to conceptually learning, thus attaining also the epistemological dimension of science. Although curricula are based on these ideas of inquiry, all too often authentic inquiry is hindered by overly authoritative approaches and teacher directions. To avoid this, the communicational ways in which teachers can encourage pupil reasoning during different phases of inquiry should be explicitly addressed. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a d…