A Comparison Study:Assessing Teachers' Conceptions with the Chemistry Concepts Inventory

摘要

Current science education reforms advocate that science in our schools must be for all students with inquiry playing a central role in meeting the needs of diverse student populations (1-3).Teacher quality has been identified as a critical issue related to student achievement,with minority and poor students less likely to have access to a highly qualified teacher and quality science education (4).Ingersoll reports that 56% of students in secondary physical science classes were taught by teachers without even a minor in physics,chemistry,geology,or earth science (5).Yet,teaching science as inquiry requires that teachers have a highly structured and deep conceptual knowledge base (6).Unfortunately,teachers with a major in their teaching area have been found to have poorly organized subject matter knowledge (7,8) and out-of-disci-pline teachers are even more likely to have limited and fragmented understanding of the subject (6,9,10).