Teachers’ Beliefs: Positive or Negative Indicators of Inquiry-Based Science Teaching?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Inquiry-based science teaching is an innovative pedagogy that is more effective than traditional instruction in promoting scientific literacy. However, teachers must develop strong favourable beliefs about inquiry teaching before they can successfully employ it to improve students’ learning outcomes. Despite its importance few studies have been done to examine teachers’ beliefs about inquiry teaching in places, like Africa, where there are serious inquiry curricula implementation challenges. This study investigated whether teachers’ beliefs are positive or negative indicators of inquiry-based science teaching. Convergent parallel mixed methods was used for the study. Purposive and stratified random sampling were used to select 308 and subsample of 18 integrated science teachers from public and private junior high schools (JHSs) from urban and rural areas. Administration of questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were used for the quantitative and qualitative data collection. The questionnaire has content and construct validities and is reliable. The interview schedule is credible and dependable. One finding suggests that most teachers in the research setting hold weak beliefs about inquiry teaching but strong beliefs about traditional instruction, that are negative indicators of inquiry-based science teaching. Other findings indicate that there are significant school type and academic qualification differences in teachers’ beliefs about inquiry-based science teaching. One implication of the findings is that currently most teachers in the study context do not hold strong positive beliefs necessary for the implementation of inquiry-based science curricula. It is recommended that regular inquiry-based in-service trainings be designed to improve teachers’ beliefs. It is also recommended that inquiry-based in-service trainings should be designed based on teachers’ school type and academic qualifications.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".