Conference Publication Details
Mandatory Fields
Guilfoyle, L., McCormack, O., Erduran, S.
European Science Education Research Association
“Wishy-Washy Nonsense”: Student Science Teachers Epistemic Comparisons of Educational Studies and Physical Sciences
2017
August
Published
1
()
Optional Fields
Epistemology Initial Teacher Education (Pre-service) Teacher Professional Education
Dublin, Ireland
21-AUG-17
25-AUG-17
 The need for development of teachers’ epistemic beliefs has been highlighted as important for the improvement of science education (Erduran, Bravo, & Naaman, 2007; Sandoval, 2005). International literature indicates that many science teachers hold ‘less sophisticated’ beliefs about the nature of knowledge and the nature of knowing (personal epistemologies - Hofer & Pintrich, 1997) in science (Kang, 2008; Topcu, 2013). Teacher educators have also been concerned about teachers’ rejection of education studies (Korthagen, 2010; McGarr, O’Grady, & Guilfoyle, 2017) but have not yet considered the potential influence of teachers’ subject-area epistemic beliefs on the perceptions they hold towards Education studies. This research explores how science teachers’ use epistemic beliefs in science and education studies to justify their acceptance or rejection of education studies as a useful part of their professional knowledge base. This paper reports data from the first set of in-depth semi-structured interviews with 12 teachers in a longitudinal study. The unique finding of this study is that science teachers appear to draw on epistemic beliefs about science in order to justify negative criticism of knowledge from education studies components of their teacher education, while others with more developed epistemic beliefs advocate for the utility of education studies to teachers’ professional practice.

Irish Research Council
Grant Details