Teachers’ and Educational Administrators’ Conceptions of Inquiry: Do They Promote or Constrain Inquiry-Based Science Teaching in Junior High Schools?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study sought to examine whether teachers’ and educational administrators’ conceptions of inquiry promote or constrain inquiry-based science teaching in junior high schools. The study also explored any connections between participants’ conceptions of scientific inquiry, inquiry teaching, and inquiry learning. Multiple-case study involving semi-structured interviews was used to collect data from 18 integrated science teachers and 23 educational administrators from rural and urban areas in the Central Region of Ghana. Analysis of the qualitative data involved open coding and categorisation of participants’ responses. We found that all the teachers and educational administrators held either uninformed or partially informed conceptions of scientific inquiry and inquiry teaching and learning which, constrain inquiry-based science instruction in junior high schools. We also found that participants’ conceptions of scientific inquiry reflected in their conceptions of science teaching and learning. Again, we found that the uninformed conceptions of inquiry developed from participants’ lack of exposure and experiences with inquiry-based science instruction when they were students. We recommend regular explicit-reflective in-service trainings to promote teachers’ and educational administrators’ conceptions and teachers’ practice of inquiry-based science teaching. We also recommend reforms in preservice science education that emphasise the engagement of prospective teachers in collaborative explicit-reflective inquiry investigations and instructional practices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".