Teaching Inquiry in Secondary School Science: Beliefs and Practice, Challenges and Program Support

In spite of a multi-decade mandate to enact inquiry in science, research reports that a large gap continues to exist in Ontario between the vision of science education presented in curriculum documents and what is enacted in the classroom. A three-staged, mixed methods design was chosen to examine teachers’ beliefs and practices that contribute to an understanding of this longstanding gap in teaching practice related to inquiry. The participants in this study were secondary school science teachers currently employed by one medium-sized, urban & rural district public school board. Quantitative data was first collected through a self-reporting survey designed to explore teachers’ beliefs related to teaching and learning in inquiry. Completed questionnaires were submitted by 80 % (n = 83) of the population of science teachers. Qualitative data, collected through semi-structured interviews (n = 17), were used to confirm and expand the quantitative findings. Quantitative analysis resulted in the development of an empirical framework to illustrate the dimensionality of teachers’ beliefs and practices related to inquiry. Four types of science teachers were identified during qualitative analysis, each associated with a preferred type of inquiry and each identifiable by a cluster of beliefs. A stance was determined for each of these types of teachers representing their generalized view of teaching and learning related to inquiry including: utilitarian science, content-based science, authentic contextual science, and citizenship science. Additionally, each group of teachers could be associated with one of the four quadrants in my framework. Lastly, a beliefs profile was produced to represent each quadrant in this framework based on integration of the quantitative and qualitative findings. Challenges to enactment and types of program support to foster enactment of open-ended inquiry were identified by science teachers associated with each stance. A few of these challenges and types of program support represent newer areas for research that can inform educational leaders and teacher-educators and support decision-making so as to meet the diverse needs of both pre-service and in-service science teachers, thereby, fostering the enactment of open-ended inquiry as practical science.ED