Pedagogical and scientific beliefs of future primary school teachers and university science education and science lecturers

Abstract

The purposes of this study are: a) to investigate the pedagogical and scientific beliefs of primary school teachers in training (group 1, N= 60), and b) compare said beliefs with those of university lecturers in science education (group 2, N = 33) and science (group 3, N = 98). We applied the Inventory of Educational and Scientific Beliefs, INPECIP (Porlán, 1989), consisting of 51 items divided into three categories: Image of Science, Learning of Science and Science Teaching. The results show that science education lecturers are more “constructivist” in all categories than both their students and their science department peers. In the “Learning of Science” and “Science Teaching” categories, we can also see that students are more “constructivist” than science lecturers. We conclude that in order to help future teachers modify their beliefs, collaboration with science lecturers is indispensable. Keywords: pedagogical beliefs, image of science, teacher trainers.