Teachers' beliefs and self-reported use of inquiry in science education in public primary schools

This paper describes Ecuadorian in-service teachers and their science teaching practices in public primary schools. We wanted to find out to what extent teachers implement inquiry activities in science teaching, the level of support they provide and what type of inquiry they implement. Four questionnaires applied to 173 teachers resulted in the identification of high context beliefs and moderately high self-efficacy beliefs. Teachers declared to implement activities mostly to develop understanding of the material, as contrast to actual manipulation of data and/or coming to conclusions. They adopt rather a strictly guided approach in contrast to giving autonomy to learners to work on their own. Finally, teachers keep control with regard to question formulation and choice in solution procedures, which constrains the development of real inquiry. When comparing teacher beliefs, we found that teachers’ context beliefs make a difference in the level of support teachers provide to their students. Teachers with lower context beliefs ask students to perform inquiry activities on their own to a lesser extent as compared to teachers with higher context beliefs. This implies that further research on the implementation of inquiry in science teaching should take into account teachers’ differences in their context beliefs. We also found out that the use of high or low support in inquiry activities remained the same for teachers with either higher or lower self-efficacy beliefs