Students with high reading proficiency typically achieve better results in science assessments, indicating the importance of reading proficiency. Since the process of reading is a complex interaction ...between properties of a text and a reader, the linguistic demands of a text might affect text comprehension. Certain linguistic features, such as complex syntactic structures and low word frequency, have been found to create higher cognitive load. However, studies investigating the influence of linguistic features on test item difficulty and students’ text comprehension in science have hitherto let to inconclusive results. The present study investigates whether the linguistic demands of expository text affect German students’ text comprehension in the domain of physics. Within an experimental study, we presented three introductory texts on different subtopics of thermodynamics and 27 single-select, multiple-choice items to 812 secondary school students (grades 7–9). Items measured students’ text comprehension (dependent variable); the linguistic demands of each text were systematically varied across three levels (independent variables) while other features of text quality and content were held constant. The results of the item response theory analysis indicated no consistent differences in item difficulty across levels of linguistic demands. Moreover, differential analyses of subgroups presented no consistent differences in solution frequencies of items related to different linguistic demands. Furthermore, while the highest linguistic demand of the texts led the students to perceive a lower comprehensibility, their text comprehension was not affected. Hence, this study provides evidence that the influence of linguistic features on text comprehension is at most low and might be overestimated in present discussions.
Zusammenfassung
Verstehen und Lernen von fachlichen Inhalten im Physikunterricht hängen eng mit dem Verstehen von Sprache zusammen, wie sie im Unterricht gebraucht wird. Von Physiklehrkräften wird ...daher erwartet, dass sie ihren Unterricht sprachexplizit gestalten. Bei der Unterrichtsgestaltung greifen Lehrkräfte im Unterricht häufig auf bereits vorhandene, überwiegend implizite Wissensbestände zurück, die sich wesentlich im Laufe der eigenen Schulzeit entwickelt haben. Im Fokus der vorliegenden Studie steht daher die Rekonstruktion von solchen impliziten erfahrungsbasierten Wissensbeständen bzw. Orientierungen, die das Handeln der Physiklehrkräfte im Unterricht beeinflussen können. Im Rahmen eines explorativen Designs wurden leitfadengestützte Interviews mit angehenden Physiklehrkräften geführt. Das Interviewmaterial wurde mithilfe der Dokumentarischen Methode analysiert, mit dem Ziel, Orientierungen herauszuarbeiten, die im Umgang mit Sprache im Physikunterricht handlungsleitend wirken können. Zudem wurden als Ergebnisse einer relationalen Typenbildung Zusammenhänge von mehreren Orientierungen herausgearbeitet.
Die Ergebnisse der Studie zeigen, dass das Thema Sprache bzw. Sprachförderung im Sample in Bezug auf Heterogenität von Lerngruppen sowie als Bearbeiten administrativ-normativer Vorgaben behandelt wird. Weitere Orientierungen, die das Handeln von Physiklehrkräften in Bezug auf Sprache strukturieren, sind eigene Wirksamkeit, Rahmung des Unterrichts im Hinblick auf Lehrer- bzw. Schülerperspektive sowie Umgang mit Vorgaben im Allgemeinen. Die Ergebnisse der relationalen Typenbildung werden in Form von vier relationalen Typen vorgestellt: ‚Eigene Rolle suchende Lehrkraft‘, ‚unhinterfragt annehmende Lehrkraft‘, ‚reflektiert-gestaltende Lehrkraft‘ und ‚idealistische Lehrkraft‘. Im Hinblick auf die Ergebnisse vermuten wir, dass die wahrgenommene Fachkultur des Physikunterrichts Berufswahlentscheidungen bereits in der eigenen Schulzeit beeinflusst und der jeweilige Umgang mit Normen und Anforderungen das Lehrerhandeln der Physiklehrkräfte nicht nur im Bereich eines sprachexpliziten Physikunterrichts, sondern allgemein im Umgang mit unterrichtlichen Innovationen prägt.
This paper presents a rationale for utilizing HPS to teach physics and the NoS developed in the course of a project funded by the European Union. A core feature of this approach is formed by the ...development of historical case studies for the use in lessons. Furthermore, the learners’ perspectives are explicitly taken into account. Teaching methods comprise student-centered activities as creative writing for understanding science and scientists and role-play activities. Emphasis is laid on experimental work which is performed with the help of true-to-the-original replications of historical apparatus, especially built for this purpose. A new characteristic for NoS learning is introduced, namely the reflection corner giving the opportunity to explicitly discussing the relationship between history, knowledge acquisition, and the application of scientific findings. In order to make use of the special skills, creative potentials and experiences of teachers a symbiotic strategy for the development and evaluation process of the teaching material was adopted where a close and long-standing cooperation between science teachers and science educators could be established. On this basis the German partners were able to complete numerous case studies from the fields of mechanics, electricity, magnetism and heat.
Individuals are increasingly relying on social media as their primary source of scientific information. Science education needs to adapt. Nature of science (NOS) education is already widely accepted ...as essential to scientific literacy and to an informed public. We argue that NOS now needs to also include the NOS communication: its mediation, mechanisms, and manipulation. Namely, students need to learn about the epistemics of communicative practices, both within science (as a model) and in society. After profiling the current media landscape, we consider the implications of recent major studies on science communication for science education in the 21st century. We focus in particular on communicative patterns prominent in social media: algorithms to aggregate news, filter bubbles, echo chambers, spirals of silence, false‐consensus effects, fake news, and intentional disinformation. We claim that media literacy is now essential to a complete view of the NOS, or “Whole Science.” We portray that new content as an extension of viewing science as a system of specialized experts, with mutual epistemic dependence, and the social and communicative practices that establish trust and credibility.
For the promotion of students' learning in science, teachers must attend to critical classroom situations in which students express their ideas about scientific concepts and methods. The notion of ...professional vision is used to describe the skill of noticing situations that are relevant for learning and understanding. The present study contributes to solving the problem of whether professional vision with a physics-specific focus can be validly measured through the application of an instrument based on scripted instructional videos and a partially closed questionnaire. In three sub-studies, video vignettes, and items were developed, resulting in an instrument consisting of 19 items (EAP reliability was 0.698) through which physics-specific professional vision could be measured. Further analysis supported the construct validity of the instrument. It has been shown that physics-specific professional vision differed significantly according to the subject studied by pre-service teachers (i.e. physics and geography), indicating a physics specificity of the construct.
Although the promotion of students' language proficiency is an objective of all school subjects, many physics teachers self-evidently expect their students to apply sophisticated language ...repertoires. We assume that this expectation affects how physics teachers assess students' texts in a classroom assessment. More precisely, we suppose that physics teachers confound students' achievements in terms of content and language. To our knowledge, there is hardly any research about the role of language in physics teachers' everyday assessment practices. Thus, to verify our supposition, we conducted an exploratory mixed-method study with 21 German in-service physics teachers. To collect valid empirical data, we asked the participants to assess a selection of four answers to a short essay question written by secondary school students. The four texts were chosen with systematically varied quality in terms of content and language (from low to high). The teachers were asked to think aloud while assessing the students' texts. Moreover, we conducted post-interviews with the teachers and challenged them to perform pairwise comparisons of the four students' texts. The verbal reports of each participant were audio-recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using multiple techniques (i.e., qualitative content analysis and non-parametric statistics). In summary, the most plausible interpretation of our exploratory findings is that the teachers in our study moderately confound content-related and language-related students' achievements. Finally, the implications of this finding for science education research and science teacher education are outlined.
The inclusion of the history and philosophy of science (HPS) in science teaching is widely accepted, but the actual state of implementation in schools is still poor. This article investigates ...possible reasons for this discrepancy. The demands science teachers associate with HPS-based teaching play an important role, since these determine teachers’ decisions towards implementing its practices and ideas. We therefore investigate the perceptions of 8 HPS-experienced German middle school physics teachers within and beyond an HPS implementation project. Within focused interviews these teachers describe and evaluate the challenges of planning and conducting HPS-based physics lessons using collaboratively developed HPS teaching materials. The teachers highlight a number of obstacles to the implementation of HPS specific to this approach: finding and adapting HPS teaching material, knowing and using instructional design principles for HPS lessons, presenting history in a motivating way, dealing with students’ problematic ideas about the history of science, conducting open-ended historical classroom investigations in the light of known historical outcomes, using historical investigations to teach modern science concepts, designing assessments to target HPS-specific learning outcomes, and justifying the HPS-approach against curriculum and colleagues. Teachers' perceived demands point out critical aspects of pedagogical content knowledge necessary for confident, comfortable and effective teaching of HPS-based science. They also indicate how HPS teacher education and the design of curricular materials can be improved to make implementing HPS into everyday teaching less demanding.
Assessment Literacy Markus Sebastian Feser; Dietmar Höttecke
Herausforderung Lehrer*innenbildung,
06/2020, Letnik:
3, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Leistungsbeurteilungen gehören zum Schulalltag. Lehrkräfte schätzen die mündliche Mitarbeit ihrer Schüler*innen ein, sie bewerten fachspezifisches praktisches Tun oder korrigieren Klassenarbeiten. ...Für erziehungswissenschaftliche Forschung stellt sich daher die Frage, was im Kontext von schulischer Leistungsbeurteilung professionelles Lehrer*innenhandeln auszeichnet. Als Antwort auf diese Frage kann das im internationalen Raum zunehmend anerkannte Rahmenkonzept Assessment Literacy gelten. Ziel dieses Beitrags ist, die verschiedenen Konzepte von Assessment Literacy unterschiedlicher Autor*innen in einem kohärenten Modell zusammenzuführen. Hierzu werden zunächst verschiedene Konzepte der Assessment Literacy von Lehrkräften systematisch geordnet. Anschließend erfolgt eine Synthese dieser Konzepte in einem umfassenden Modell. Implikationen des vorgeschlagenen Assessment-Literacy-Modells für die erziehungswissenschaftliche Forschung und für die Verbesserung der Lehrer*in-nenbildung werden am Ende des Beitrags diskutiert.
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