A Kaleidoscope of Understanding: Teacher Candidates’ Understanding of Climate Change

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I am pleased to announce the publication of an article that reports on research conducted with colleagues on teacher candidates’ conceptual understanding of the science of climate change.

Hayhoe, D., Bullock, S. M., & Hayhoe, K. (2011). A kaleidoscope of understanding: Comparing real with random data, using binary-choice items, to study pre-service elementary teachers’ knowledge of climate change. Weather, Climate, and Society, 3, 254–260.doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/WCAS-D-11-00021.1

Abstract

The authors used a 59-item survey to probe the understanding of climate change by 89 Ontario preservice teachers. The study investigated the usefulness of comparing real survey data from closed, binary choice items, with randomly generated data. Climate change was chosen to be the topic because it is a new emphasis in K–12 science curricula. If teachers had answered the survey randomly, according to Monte Carlo simulations, a normal distribution would result, with 56 of the 59 items answered correctly by 40%–60% of the respondents. A bimodal distribution resulted, however, with 34 items answered correctly by more than 60% and 18 items by less than 40%. Apparently, the teachers knew a lot about climate change, but also had many misconceptions, some identified here for the first time. Item discrimination indices and correlation coefficients, however, were the same for the real versus Monte Carlo data, suggesting that preservice teachers’ knowledge was a “kaleidoscope of understanding,” rather than a coherent picture. This may be because their understanding of climate change came primarily from unconnected sources in the media, or because climate change science involves many different fields of study including astronomy, biology, chemistry, ecology, oceanography, and physics. In conclusion, the analysis herein demonstrates the benefit of comparing real and random data for binary-choice item surveys in multidiscipline topics such as climate change. For those interested in climate change education, these results suggest the importance of emphasizing the difference between reliable and unreliable sources of information and giving careful attention to how to draw on concepts from different scientific fields.

**Note: This article was only recently made available, despite the October 2011 date of the journal issue.

Teaching 2.0: (Re)learning to teach online

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I am pleased to announce the publication of my article, Teaching 2.0: (Re)learning to teach online in the most recent issue of Interactive Technology and Smart Education. The purpose of the paper was to document and analyse the my first two years of developing a pedagogy that meaningfully incorporates the content creation and social collaboration functions of digital technologies. The paper is part of a special issue that takes a look at the first 8 years of UOIT’s experiences as a laptop-enabled university. I encourage you to check out my article and the articles written by my colleagues.

The link to the article: http://www.tinyurl.com/bullock2011itse

Creating and Using Mini-Clips in the Physics Classroom

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I was pleased to present, with freshly-minted new physics teacher @nathanchow, a workshop at the annual meeting of the Ontario Association of Physics Teachers (OAPT).

The abstract for the session:

Digital technologies are an increasingly prevalent part of everyday life, particularly for secondary school students. Physics education has a long history of using technology in productive ways to engage students’ thinking about physics concepts; some of the more popular approaches include using Probeware for experiments and Physlets for simulations. This presentation will demonstrate the potential power of creating and using short video “mini-clips” to engage students in conceptual discussions about physics. This workshop will suggest some ways that teachers can create, and encourage students to create, their own mini-clips for use in physics. Characteristics of effective mini-clips will be explored and participants will discuss the merits and drawbacks to sample mini-clips. A key feature of this workshop will be to highlight inexpensive, cross-platform approaches to creating mini-clips for use in both the physics classroom and the general science classroom.

Understanding the Complexity of Becoming a Teacher Educator

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Shawn M. Bullock (UOIT), Judy Williams (Monash University), Jason K. Ritter (Duquesne University)

The purpose of this session at the 2011 meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) is to present the findings of a review of the literature concerning becoming a teacher educator and to obtain feedback on these findings from the self-study of teacher education practices (S-STEP) SIG community.

Overview

Self-study of teacher education practice (S-STEP) methodology has figured prominently in the development of each author’s pedagogy of teacher education. United by an interest in the process of identity de/re-construction inherent in becoming a teacher educator, the authors conducted an extensive review of what we call the becoming a teacher educator (BTE) literature. In particular, we were interested in exploring the themes raised by beginning teacher educators analyzing their transitions in action, rather than on accounts written by experienced teacher educators looking back on their experiences. We further limited our review to literature written since the formation of the S-STEP SIG in the early 1990s.

Analysis and review of 60 articles revealed five themes that we believe are germane to the challenges associated with becoming a teacher educator:

  1. Evaluating the usefulness of prior professional experiences.
  2. Mediating one’s institutional context and the larger political landscape.
  3. Negotiating professional and personal identities as new faculty members.
  4. Developing a distinct pedagogy of teacher education.
  5. Experiencing or forming networks of support, collaboration, and critique.

Teacher Candidates’ Conceptual Understanding of the Science of Climate Change

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A paper presented by Doug Hayhoe, Katharine Hayhoe, and me at the 2010 meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The abstract follows:

A Kaleidoscope of Understanding: Pre-service Elementary Teachers’ Knowledge of Climate Change Concepts and Impacts
D. Hayhoe1; S. Bullock2; K. Hayhoe3
1. Education, Tyndale University College, Toronto, ON, Canada.
2. Education, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Oshawa, ON, Canada.
3. Geosciences, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, United States.
Teachers are at the forefront of efforts to increase climate literacy; however, even teachers’ understanding can contain significant misconceptions. Probes aimed at capturing these misconceptions have been used with pre-service teachers in several countries. Here, we report on a unique 59-item questionnaire useful as a pre-post diagnostic for teacher training. Topics include Earth’s climate system, long-range climatic changes, recent changes, various gases and types of radiation involved in the greenhouse effect, future impacts of climate change, and mitigation options This questionnaire is unique in three ways: 1. the topics include climate change concepts not usually probed, 2. the questions have a binary-choice format that avoided both the “positive statement bias” of agree-disagree questions and the superfluous distractors of multiple-choice tests, and 3. the questionnaire was piloted with pre-service elementary teachers in Toronto, one of the most multicultural cities in the world. The questionnaire items were written for the Ontario curriculum (K-10); however, they also address almost all of the principles identified in Climate Literacy: The Essential Principles of Climate Science.The questionnaire was completed by 89 volunteers from a pool of 280. Most had a substantial knowledge of climate change concepts, with 34 of the 59 questions being answered correctly by more than 60% of the subjects. The item discrimination of most questions was relatively low, however, and only a very few item pairs showed a significant correlation. This suggests that subjects’ knowledge consisted of a “kaleidoscope of understanding,” rather than a coherent picture. Significant misconceptions were also identified, with 18 of the 59 items being answered incorrectly by more than 60% of the subjects. Of these, 11 correspond to misconceptions previously noted, while 7 suggest new misconceptions not yet identified in studies done with students or teachers, such as the idea that most of the Sun’s radiant energy is concentrated in the infrared part rather than in the visible part of the spectrum (92%), the amount of energy that Earth’s system radiates into outer space every day is much less than the amount of energy it receives from the Sun every day (65%), and waste heat resulting from human use of fossil fuel contributes significantly to global warming (82%). On the other hand, the pre-service teachers understood well several other important concepts such as the fact that Earth’s surface continues to give off radiation at night (94%) and that Earth’s climate has varied in long-period natural cycles (92%).

These findings have several implications for the teaching of climate change concepts to elementary pre-service teachers: 1. the coherence between concepts taken from various sciences should be emphasized, 2. the concepts that are (surprisingly) understood well by a great majority of teachers should be built upon, and 3. activities should be developed to address the many misconceptions that continue to persist in pre-service elementary teachers’ understanding.