Student Number : 0392307 PhD thesis Faculty of Science / In this study I explore concepts of relevant science, curriculum and development through participation and engagement with two schools and their community in the rural area of Chibini in Kwa-Zulu Natal. During a three-year involvement a research team, students, teachers, parents and farmers, supported by traditional leaders and NGO1s, developed a communitybased science curriculum. Amongst urgent concerns for health care, employment, traditional values – even survival, profound lessons in understandings of appropriate science, practical skills-development and ubuntu emerged. Western conventions of frameworks, protocols, goals, identity, even ways of researching are challenged through engaged transformation. Relevant science has parallels with relevant research in its purposes and processes of contributing to both knowledge and community well-being. The research drew upon interdisciplinary pedagogy as well as interdisciplinary methodological paradigms, moving from learner-centred education to communitycentred education and from the research paradigm of mindful inquiry to ubuntu. Rural communities can benefit from community-centred, project-based learning which contributes to immediate needs, draws on community strengths and is centred in ubuntu. Rural communities, in turn, have valuable contributions to make to science education transformation. This study formed part of a collaborative project: ‘Human Rights, Democracy, and Social Justice: Science and Mathematics Literacy in Disadvantaged Communities’ led from the Centre for Educational Research, Evaluation and Policy, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, Durban, South Africa.

The study was conducted at the largest public sector nursing college in the Gauteng province. The South African Nursing Council (SANC) regulation, R425 paragraph (f) stipulates that Biological Nursing Science (BNS) shall be included in the curriculum taught in the four-year diploma nursing programme, leading to registration as a professional nurse. BNS is an ancillary subject in the four year diploma programme in nursing. However, SANC does not stipulate that Biology should be a prerequisite for entry into the nursing programme. Biology as a school subject is neither a prerequisite nor a selection criterion for entry into the four year diploma nursing programme. Since the selection criteria have been widened for entry into nursing, the funders of nursing education seem to consider Biology even less important than before. Hence, the entry criteria are based on the matric score that the applicant achieves following the consideration of symbols obtained in different subjects. Poor performance in Biological Nursing Science (BNS) of students registered for the 4-year Diploma in Nursing is of grave concern to educators, students and funders of nursing education. A preview of nursing students’ summative results in BNS over a two year period showed a drop in the overall pass rate from 89% to 50%. It was hypothesised that prior biology knowledge or lack thereof might be a reason why BNS is difficult for first and second level nursing students; there is, however, no evidence to support this. Hence, it was intended to establish the factors that contribute to or are related to the performance of students in BNS in their first and second years of the four year diploma in nursing. The purpose of the study was to analyse the performance in BNS 1 and BNS 2 of student nurses at a public nursing college. In this study the sample comprised two groups of third and fourth year nursing students who have studied BNS 1 in their first year and BNS 2 in their second year of the programme (N=424); 312 (73.6%) agreed to participate; 175 were third year students and 137 fourth year students. A quantitative, survey research design was used. A retrospective record review and a questionnaire were used to collect data.. Students’ academic records were used to obtain BNS 1 and BNS 2 tests and summative examination results. Students’ admission records were used to obtain the socio-demographic data. A total of 364 records were reviewed and constituted the records sample (n=364). Data were entered onto an Excel spread sheet. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyse the data and to present the results. Chi square (X²) was used to test for significant differences between study variables. The p-value was set at 0.05 level of significance. The study found that age is the only demographic variable that influences BNS performance; with the age range between 17 to 50 years, older students have lower mean scores in BNS than younger students. The results showed that for every 1 year increase in age, a 0.28% mark decrease in the BNS 2 main examination mark could be expected. The most popular subject choices in high school are Biology and Physics, however, only Physics was shown to have a significant positive influence on the performance of students in BNS examinations. Among the least chosen subjects are Business Studies and Business Economics which were also shown to have a positive effect on BNS performance. It may be concluded that the subjects Physics, Business studies and Business Economics enhance students’ performance in BNS. On the contrary Biology, was shown not to have an effect on the performance of students in BNS (p=0.15). Previous Biology knowledge did not significantly influence lecture attendance and students’ use of prescribed material but those who had studied Biology more than five years ago or not at all, were more inclined to use recommended material.

Orientador: Lizete Maria Orquiza Carvalho / Banca: Rejane Aurora Mion / Banca: Ana Maria de Andrade Caldeira / Resumo: Este trabalho analisou um projeto desenvolvido por três professores do Ensino Médio, um de Física, um de Química e um de Biologia, que consistiu em preparar uma situação- problema a partir da complexidade de um caso de tratamento radioterápico de câncer de colo uterino, e desenvolvê-la em sala de aula, o que representou não somente trazer, para a sala de aula, fatos que estão mais próximos da realidade do aluno, mas também percorrer caminhos inversos àqueles do ensino institucionalizado, os quais normalmente partem dos conteúdos disciplinares e se desenvolvem no sentido da exemplificação. Nossa contribuição consistiu em construir um ponto de vista externo, a partir da análise das gravações de reuniões e de aulas, procurando evidenciar aspectos que se referem à formação dos professores envolvidos. Os dados foram analisados sob três pontos de vista: compromisso, autonomia e interdisciplinaridade. Enquanto as reuniões dos professores se sucederam sem que houvesse contato com alunos, eles não tiveram sucesso em "compor o quadro interdisciplinar". No entanto, a situação armada no início do ano somente encontrou terreno para se desenvolver no segundo semestre, quando os professores tinham o desafio de responder aos alunos. Assim consideramos que as condições que garantiram a experiência como formação de professores foram: a potencialidade para a interdisciplinaridade devido à escolha de um caso real como ponto de partida; uma situação problema, representada pelo desejo dos professores de ampliar os conhecimentos dos adolescentes em torno da questão do câncer do colo do útero e HPV; uma situação de ensino, que impôs a necessidade de eles responderem a adolescente reais; o bom domínio do conteúdo disciplinar, por parte de cada um deles; e o comprometimento de todos com o trabalho coletivo e com a aprendizagem dos alunos. / Abstract: This work analyses a Project developed by three high school teachers, one of Physics, one of Chemistry and one of Biology, that consisted of both preparing a situation-problem from the complexity of a case of radiotherapical treatment of uterine col cancer, and developing it in the classroom. This fact represented both to bring to the classroom students real world and to walk contrary to the institutionalized teaching ways, which normally start from a determined subject-matter and go toward exemplification. Our contribution consisted of constructing an external point of view, by analyzing transcriptions of meetings and lessons in order to look for aspects referring to the teachers' education. The data had been analyzed under three points of view: commitment, autonomy and interdisciplinarity. While the teachers meetings occurred far from the interaction among teachers and students, they did not succeed in composing the "interdisciplinary picture". However, the situation that was set at the beginning of the year only found room to develop later, when the teacher already had the challenge to respond to students. The conditions that established the experience as a teacher education one were: the potentiality for the interdisciplinarity to occur due to the choice of a real case as starting point; a situation problem, represented for teachers desire to enlarge adolescents knowledge around the issue of the uterine col cancer and HPV; an actual educational situation, that imposed the necessity for the teachers to respond to real adolescents; teachers' mastering of their own disciplinary content; and the commitment of all with collaborative work and students learning. / Mestre

Thesis advisor: Richard Jackson / This study examined organizational change in science museums toward practices that are inclusive of people with disabilities. Guided by two overarching frameworks, organizational learning and the social model of disability, this study sought to answer the following: What are the contexts and processes that facilitate, sustain, or impede a science museum's change toward practices that are inclusive of people with disabilities? The research orientation was a qualitative, multiple case study. The cases featured three science museums that varied in size and location, but shared a documented history of efforts to include people with disabilities. Data were collected through observations and interviews with people with disabilities, interviews with staff members, observations of museum work, and documentation. Data analysis focused on generating descriptions and interpretation of the individual cases and the collection of cases. Findings demonstrate that change toward inclusion in these three museums is an on-going process that is embedded within the work of a broad range of organizational areas. Findings also suggest actions science museums can take to facilitate change toward inclusion, including involving people with disabilities in organizational work, engaging in experimentation and reflection, promoting the idea that practices that benefit people with disabilities also improve the museum for others, and embedding information about inclusive practices into internal communication, professional development, and large projects. These actions appear to promote organizational learning and sustainment of inclusive practices by concretizing the purpose of inclusion, developing staff who serve as internal resources, providing mechanisms for on-going feedback, and raising staff awareness of the importance of inclusion. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

<p> Science teachers in the United States are not prepared to teach the students in their classrooms. Teachers are most often White females, while the children in their classrooms are from diverse backgrounds. Multicultural pedagogies exist, but teachers must be educated during their teacher preparation courses to understand their own relationship with race before they can enact such pedagogies in their classrooms. This qualitative study sought to examine the lived experiences of eight science education doctoral students in a course called Critical Voices in Teacher Education, through the qualitative method approach of transcendental phenomenology. The participants&rsquo; experiences were examined through three theoretical frameworks: transformative learning theory, White racial identity, and racial literacy. Interviews, field notes, and student reflections were used to collect data for this phenomenological study. The findings showed that through the process of critical reflection and group discussion, participants had a transformative experience in which their racial identities developed, and perceptions of students and curriculum shifted to include multicultural pedagogical approaches. The findings from this study supported the idea that teacher education programs must use racial identity development and multicultural curriculum as a foundation for all education programs.</p><p>

<p> Although research is limited on the effectiveness of co-teaching as a service delivery model for students with disabilities, through observation, many educators have reported positive outcomes with co-teaching (Beninghof, 2011). This case study was designed to examine the implementation of co-teaching in an elementary magnet school in a Midwestern school district driven by science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) and with a strong emphasis on personalized learning. General education teachers, special education teachers, and administrators were interviewed three times during the initial implementation school year. In addition, journaling was documented by three of the participants, and co-teaching fidelity checks were completed by the school district&rsquo;s Executive Director of Special Services. After information was gathered and analyzed, it was discovered both students with and without disabilities benefit from co-teaching as a service delivery model. It was also noted there are similarities between the benefits and challenges in a traditional co-taught classroom and a co-taught class in a STEAM elementary school with an emphasis on personalized learning. The benefits of co-teaching far outweigh the detriments. It was further discovered the success of co-teaching is attributed to the pairing of co-teaching partnerships. Finally, the participants shared the need for special education administrators to play a more active role in professional development and the sustainability of co-teaching.</p><p>

This study was undertaken to investigate the relationship between student reading performance and achievement in science. Many students have difficulties comprehending written materials presented to them in science and many tests used to measure achievement in science rely heavily on reading ability. Students may have trouble demonstrating their science knowledge due to their lack of reading skills.In this study, the reading ages and science achievement scores of students were calculated. Twenty activity cards used to teach the science topic Plants and Animals were modified to reduce the language difficulty level. All students in two Year 8 science classes used the modified activity cards and modified science achievement measures. Five students were selected to form a sub-sample of the class group for in-depth observations, interviews, and analysis. These students were low performance readers who achieved poorly on science topic tests even though they had excellent work habits. The student reading ages in the class groups ranged from 8 years 1 month to above 16 years 10 months.The reading performance data were found to correlate significantly with science achievement as measured on topic tests. Class 1 produced a correlation coefficient of 0.46, while Class 2 produced a correlation coefficient of 0.75. In this study it appears that science achievement is related to reading performance.Qualitative analysis of data from the five students in the sub-sample showed that the modified activity cards were relatively easy to use. Students could work on the cards independently. This study demonstrated that textual material needs to be presented at an appropriate reading level for independent learning to occur.All of the students in the sub-sample demonstrated improved science achievement on the modified Plants and Animals topic test. In addition, most other students in the ++ / study improved their performance on the modified science test. Thus, the modiifications appeared to make it easier for most students to demonstrate their science achievement.A positive correlation was found between student reading age and science achievement. Reading performance may be a critical factor in achievement on science tests. If this is the case, learning strategies must be developed that focus on helping students to utilize textual materials effectively.

This thesis addresses the problematic relationship between teacher personal philosophies of science and teacher pedagogy. The research literature on philosophy of science and its impact on science education identifies the persistence and pervasiveness of traditional philosophies of science, such as inductive-empiricism and positivism, that misrepresent the practice of science. Although researchers have expressed concern about the influence of teacher beliefs in inductive-empiricism and positivism on teacher practice in the science classroom, the results of research in this field are inconclusive.This thesis reports an interpretive research study of three high school science teachers. An interpretive framework was developed in order to assist in the identification of teachers personal philosophies of science. The framework comprises philosophical theories of ontology, epistemology, and theory building, and the key assumptions of major philosophers of science.Interpretive analyses were conducted on classroom discourse in order to examine the influence of the three teachers personal philosophies of science on their teaching practice. Data were collected by means of participant-observation, audio-tape recordings, and teacher and student interviews. The validity of the research was optimised by using triangulation methods.The results of the thesis in the form of general assertions, indicate that experienced teachers personal philosophies of science comprise well-established and strongly integrated networks of ontological, epistemological, and theory building beliefs based on the traditional philosophies of science of inductive-empiricism and positivism. The results indicate also that a strong relationship exists between teachers traditional personal philosophies of science and teacher-centred classroom roles and teaching practices, and that this relationship is reinforced ++ / by institutional factors such as curriculum policy and teaching resources, and laboratory design and classroom organisation.These results have important implications for the implementation of constructivist-oriented curriculum reforms in school science.

In this thesis, I present a modest polemic about science cultural myths and their influence on school science. My analysis is critical because I seek ultimately to free teachers and students from repressive science cultural myths. Within this thesis, my critical analysis reveals the character of prevailing science cultural myths and provides evidence of their power within school science to legitimate specific forms of science knowledge to the exclusion of other forms. Subsequently, I propose a philosophical science framework for enabling teachers and students of science to transform their teaching and learning practices. These three aspects provide the framework of my thesis.The first step in my critical analysis involved the identification of the major characteristics of cultural myths. A cultural myth is a shared network of beliefs that regulate and order social practices that forgets how it was created. I argue that myths are characterised by their apparent invisibility once their historical evolution has been forgotten. Using this definition, I then examined the genesis of myths during the emergence of experimental philosophy in Western Europe in the 17th century and identified the following science cultural myths: myths associated with a naive realist perspective of observation and experimentation; myths that present science as justified, true knowledge; myths of a mechanical cosmology; and myths associated with the apparent transparency of language.Next, I examined literary aspects of school science, specifically textbooks, to search for the presence of these science cultural myths. I argue that the science presented in school science can be described as science stories, and that within these stories there is an iterative relationship between the 'facts' selected for the telling and science cultural myths. I identified four different types of stories that I ++ / call heroic, discovery, declarative and politically correct science stories, each of which helps to maintain specific myths of science. Using literary theory, I developed an approach to analysis and reconstruction of school science stories that can be used by teachers and students to assist them to transform science stories. Such an approach would help students to hear the multiple voices of science, rather than the mythical single dominant voice.I examined also the power of science cultural myths to assist or enforce the enculturation of pre-service teachers into school science. This examination was a twostep process. Firstly, using repertory grid analysis and interviews, I identified the dominant notions of science held by pre-service teachers before they began teaching Later, in follow-up interviews conducted after they had gained some teaching experience, I obtained critical insights into the interaction between the notions of science held initially by the pre-service science teachers and those endorsed by the school science culture. The results indicate the power of science cultural myths to obligate pre-service teachers to adopt uncritically specific practices within school science.Finally, I propose a philosophy of science for science education that consists of five key referents: construction, tentativeness, dynamism, neopragmatism and critique. This holistic philosophy offers science educators a framework for evolving a school science culture that is critically aware of science cultural myths and their power and that can promote the multiple voices of science.

It has long been acknowledged that pre-service Early Childhood teachers enter university with a notable lack of confidence, high levels of anxiety and an aversion to science and mathematics. Unless redressed during their time spent at university, such negative attitudes may ultimately influence the quality of science education these teachers offer to young children. This study considers the affective attitudes to science and science education of those people considered to be central to the education of young children.Specifically the study investigates the attitudes and backgrounds in science/ science education, of academics, pre-service and in-service teachers together with their attitudes towards teaching science to young children. The attitudes to science of a group of young children, aged between 4 and 8 years, were also investigated in the study. The potential links between the attitudes held by each group was of great interest to the researcher who considered the ways that academics promoted the teaching of science to young children, the factors influencing the willingness of pre-service and in-service teachers to present science to young children and the effect that teachers have on the responses of young children to science.The findings suggest that in contrast to the attitudes towards science of pre- and in-service teacher groups in the study, the young children and academics displayed attitudes such as interest, curiosity, confidence and enjoyment towards their experiences in science. There was a strong link between the memory of prior experiences in science and the present attitudes to science of the adult participants. The implications of the study are that science education in the early years will be enhanced if ways can be found to provide more positive science related experiences for pre-service and in-service teachers.