Science Teachers' Beliefs about Science and School Science and Their Perceptions of Science Laboratory Learning Environment

과학 교사의 과학 및 학교 과학에 대한 신념과 실험실 환경에 대한 인식

Science teachers' beliefs about science and school science and their perceptions of the science laboratory learning environment were investigated with an assumption that science laboratory teaching would be affected by science teachers' beliefs. Likert-scale questionnaires of BASSSQ and SLEI were used in this study. The major findings were as follows: 1. Science teachers showed inconsistent beliefs about science and school science. Their responses reflected a patch-like view of postmodern epistemology and objectivism They also showed somewhat different views about science and school science. It was found that science teachers had strong objectivist views about science in some parts. but they had moderate constructivist views about school science in other parts; 2. The mean scores of student cohesiveness, integration. and rule clarity on the actual version in SLEl were relatively high, but those of open-endedness and physical environment were very low; 3. There was no association between teachers' beliefs about science and their perceptions of the science laboratory learning environment. But some associations were found between teachers' beliefs about school science and their perception on student cohesiveness, integration, and rule clarity of the actual science laboratory learning environment. Teachers' beliefs about school science had some statistically significant correlations with their perceptions on all scales of the preferred version of SLEI. We could not show a causal relationship between teachers' beliefs and their science laboratory learning environment through these results. But it can be suggested that teachers' beliefs about school science do have a role in constructing a desirable science laboratory learning environment, as we found that there were statistically significant correlations between them.