Exploring how primary school teachers integrate children’s ideas in science during teaching and learning: a case of one primary school in Arua district

The focus of this study was to establish whether and how primary school teachers integrate children‟s ideas in science during science lessons. Primary pupils are motivated to learn if science lessons are connected to their experiences. World wide, there is a general trend of loss of interest in sciences among students, partly because teaching and learning processes are disconnected from the pupils‟ daily experiences. If planning and implementation of science lessons do not incorporate children‟s ideas in science, conceptual misunderstanding will continue, leading to poor results in sciences. In this study two teachers were selected by purposive sampling, and 12pupils were selected randomly to constitute two focus groups. The teachers were interviewed to get their views about how pupils‟ views can be integrated during science lessons. In order to triangulate the findings, lessons were observed, documents analyzed and focus group discussions were held. The findings revealed that the most experienced teacher had better strategies of integrating children‟s ideas in science lessons than the last experienced one. Besides, the two teachers did not use the strategies recommende d by researchers for integrating children‟s prior knowledge during science lessons. The study recommends that science teachers should use learner centred methods that help to elicit children‟s views and engage the learners throughout the lesson