Experience and Reflection: Preservice Science Teachers’ Capacity for Teaching Inquiry

Abstract

In this article, we investigate the relationship between preservice teachers’ inquiry experience and their capacity to reflect on the challenges involved in implementing inquiry into classrooms. For data, we draw on the personal narratives of preservice science teachers enrolled in science instruction courses. Preservice teachers with extensive inquiry experiences perceive implementation challenges principally in terms of teaching and student learning. This contrasts with the perceptions of preservice teachers with limited inquiry experience for whom the main concerns relate to the negative perceptions of others, time, the curriculum, and materials. By identifying these perceptions, it may be possible to develop courses that assist limited and moderate-experience preservice teachers’ move toward the perceptions of their more inquiry experienced colleagues.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 72 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.