Supporting student teachers in designing IBL-lessons

Abstract

Inquiry-based learning (IBL) has proven to be a didactical approach that has the potential to increase the, now lacking, motivation of students for science and mathematics. Teachers, however, need tools, and support for changing their daily practice towards more inquiry-based approaches. The attitudes of teachers towards IBL is another missing link in the research domain of IBL. The aim of this study is to determine how student teachers (STs) can be supported in implementing and taking up the benefits of IBL in science and mathematics education. A quasi-experimental study was performed on the supportiveness of guidelines for improving the redesigning of IBL-tasks. Ten STs also participated in pre- and post-interviews on their attitudes towards IBL. In the first meeting STs made a redesign while only using an IBL-framework. In the second meeting STs used an IBL-framework and guidelines to redesign an IBL-task. We evaluated to what extent their designed tasks created opportunities for IBL. Results show that STs felt designing IBL-lessons is hard, but during the second meeting their lesson designs had more degrees of freedom for students, especially in collaboration and communication. STs also mentioned that making IBL-lessons stimulated creativity and cooperation with colleagues. This study shows the added value of guidelines for designing IBL tasks in teacher education. The newly developed coding scheme for evaluating designs is a first step in this process.