After examining teachers’ interview transcripts, the researchers (one university
science education professor and one research assistant) concluded more than
twenty descriptors2 (or ‘coding keywords’) that were shown in teachers’ beliefs
about teaching science, learning science and the nature of science, respectively.
Similar to the study by Koballa et al. (2000), this study developed a framework for
representing teachers’ beliefs by merging and clustering these descriptors based on
perceived connections. The framework included three categories that could be
applied to teachers’ beliefs about all these areas. The categories were ‘traditional’,
‘process’, and ‘constructivist’. The ‘traditional’ category perceives teaching
science as transferring knowledge from teacher to students, learning science as
acquiring or ‘reproducing’ knowledge from credible sources, and scientific knowledge
as correct answers or established truths. The ‘process’ category perceives
teaching science and learning science as an activity focusing the processes of
science or problem-solving procedures, and scientific knowledge is viewed as
facts being discovered through ‘the’ scientific method or by following codified
procedures. The ‘constructivist’ category views teaching science as helping
students construct knowledge, learning science as constructing personal understanding
and science as a way of knowing. Also, although constructivism is still
a controversial topic in science education (Osborne 1996, Nola 1997, Jenkins 2000,
Matthews 2000), the position of this paper, as proposed by Staver (1998) and
Tobin (1993), is that constructivism is a sound theory to help science educators
understand how students learn science as well as to explicate the practice of science
and science teaching. There are, of course, various forms of constructivism (Tsai
1998b). This study was not intended to be a detailed analysis of the forms of
constructivism, while the term is used in this paper to imply a broader philosophical
position concerning science, science teaching and learning. A description of
the three analysis categories is presented in table 1 for beliefs of teaching science