FOCUSING ON THE SCIENCE TEACHER SETTING

There is a considerable body of evidence that indicates the importance of the teacher in determining student learning and attitudinal outcomes. This evidence is based for instance on analysis of system wide student results with teacher characteristics as an independent variable (Barber & Mourshed, 2007; Darling-Hammond, 2007), or on studies of student attitudes and aspirations, involving questionnaires of classroom environment characteristics (Fraser, 1986), or interviews with students (Darby, 2005; Lyons, 2006a). While this finding might be intuitively obvious, and long assumed as the underpinning of teacher education, it is nonetheless important to substantiate, and furthermore to fill out in some detail. Thus, an important research agenda flowing from this is to explore just what are the characteristic behaviours of teachers of science that contribute to effective student learning, and positive attitudes and aspirations. This research into the nature of effective science teaching, amounting to a description of the effective science teacher, is of fundamental importance in determining our emphases in training teachers of science, and in planning fo