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ABS255 - A moodle-based professional development program for teaching NoS in elementary science students

Theme:
2.1 Learning and development in onsite communities and online spaces
What:
Paper
When:
4:10 PM, Wednesday 30 Aug 2017 (20 minutes)
Where:
How:
Our paper concerns a Moodle-based professional development program, which is being implemented during the academic year 2016-17, aiming to improve the teaching of the Nature of Science (NoS) in twenty Greek elementary science classrooms. Research literature has consistently called for teaching NoS as the necessary foundation for increased science literacy for students. After the implementation of a developmental work research in which four teachers participated, aiming to improve their understanding of NoS and their abilities to teach it effectively to their students, we designed a distance learning professional development program for the purpose of training twenty science teachers who declared their interest in refining their teaching practices on NoS. Through engagement in online activities on Moodle, exemplary materials, case studies from the history of science, annotating videos, discussion forums, etc., teachers are exposed to various tools and teaching and learning strategies in order to design and develop NoS materials for their own students to be uploaded on the platform. Moreover, to accomplish our goal, we will guide teachers appropriately through the Moodle platform to analyze their own teaching practices and trace evidence of effective NoS teaching. An observation form will be used to document four teachers’ practices concerning NoS teaching, which will be used as case studies. Qualitative methodologies will be used to analyze the VNOS-D questionnaire, extracts from the discussion forums to gain a richer understanding of how the teachers’ NoS ideas and NoS teaching practices differentiate before and after the Moodle-based professional development program.
Participant
Teacher advisor (PERISTERI, Greece)
Participant
University of Ioannina Greece
Professor in Science Education
Participant
University of Ioannina
Participant
University of Crete, Rethymno, Greece
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