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| Hoboken City Hall circa 1981 |
Title:
Teachers' Orientations Towards and Awareness of Students'
Evolutionary and Natural Selection Alternative Conceptions and Their
Influence on Teaching Practice
May 2013
Dissertation
evolutionary theory; alternative conceptions; pedagogical content knowledge; subject matter knowledge
Evolution is the conceptual framework on which biology is based,
but its components are not well understood by many individuals, and the
topic is home to many deeply-held alternative conceptions. Nevertheless,
eliciting alternative conceptions can be a valuable resource for both
teaching and learning, but teachers often feel ill-equipped with how to
elicit their students’ alternative conceptions and/or use them in an
effective manner to deepen their students’ understanding of scientific
concepts.
Little research exists regarding how the daily demands and practices of a
group of high school teachers from the same campus impact their
students’ understanding of evolutionary concepts when being aware of,
eliciting, and potentially using their students’ alternative conceptions
as resources for learning. Using a conceptual framework that focuses on
the relationship between teachers’ subject matter knowledge (SMK) and
aspects of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), this set of studies
reports a line of inquiry from a single site that researched how: 1)
students from an urban high school learned various evolutionary and
nature of science (NOS) concepts; 2) one group of biology teachers went
about eliciting and using their students’ alternative conceptions on
various evolutionary concepts during classroom instruction; and 3)
another group of biology teachers planned and implemented an
instructional unit on evolution when their students’ alternative
conceptions were predicted and identified with a concept inventory,
specifically the Conceptual Inventory of Natural Selection (CINS).
Various data sources, including classroom observations and teacher
interviews, were used to examine the teachers’ practices in the latter
two studies.
Results from the third (current) study revealed the teachers were well
aware of their students’ natural selection alternative conceptions and
this area of their PCK was not necessarily related to their SMK of the
topic. Sustaining a kind of supportive learning environment where
alternative conceptions were elicited and used for learning was a goal
of the teachers, but they felt they could not capitalize on such
opportunities for learning due to various personal and/or institutional
constraints. Results also demonstrated that the teachers valued how the
CINS probed student understanding and used its results strategically,
and made several recommendations for high school use.
ajpetrosino@austin.utexas.edu
Picture:
Picture:
Main stairway of 1st floor - Hoboken City Hall, 86-98 Washington Street, Hoboken, Hudson County, NJ
- Digital ID: (None) hhh nj0919.photos.112899p http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/hhh.nj0919/photos.112899p
- Reproduction Number: HABS NJ,9-HOBO,1--4
- Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print
