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Teaching High School Chemistry in the Context of Pharmacology Helps Both Teachers and Students Learn.

ABSTRACT: Few studies demonstrate the impact of teaching chemistry embedded in a context that has relevance to high school students. We build upon our prior work showing that pharmacology topics (i.e., drugs), which are inherently interesting to high school students, provide a useful context for teaching chemistry and biology. In those studies, teachers were provided professional development for the Pharmacology Education Partnership (PEP) in an onsite venue (either five-day or one-day workshop). Given financial difficulties to travel, teachers have asked for alternatives for professional development. Thus, we developed the same PEP training workshop using a distance learning (DL) (two-way live video) approach. In this way, 121 chemistry and biology teachers participated in the DL workshops to learn how to incorporate the PEP modules into their teaching. They field-tested the modules over the year in high school chemistry and biology classes. Teacher knowledge of chemistry and biology increased significantly after the workshop and was maintained for at least a year. Their students (N = 2309) demonstrated a significant increase in knowledge of chemistry and biology concepts, with higher scores as the number of modules used increased. The increase in both teacher and student knowledge in these subjects was similar to that found previously when teachers were provided with onsite professional development.

SUBMITTER: Schwartz-Bloom RD

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4037129 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Teaching High School Chemistry in the Context of Pharmacology Helps Both Teachers and Students Learn.

Schwartz-Bloom Rochelle D RD Halpin Myra J MJ Reiter Jerome P JP

Journal of chemical education 20110601 6

Few studies demonstrate the impact of teaching chemistry embedded in a context that has relevance to high school students. We build upon our prior work showing that pharmacology topics (i.e., drugs), which are inherently interesting to high school students, provide a useful context for teaching chemistry and biology. In those studies, teachers were provided professional development for the Pharmacology Education Partnership (PEP) in an onsite venue (either five-day or one-day workshop). Given fi ...[more]

PMID: 24882881

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Project description:The transformation toward more sustainable food choices may be supported by an education for sustainable nutrition. In schools, biology teachers play a key role in educating students as sustainability change makers, as biology lessons provide various opportunities to deal with ESD-topics such as sustainable nutrition. Teachers' classroom practices may be influenced by their personal choices regarding sustainable nutrition. Additionally, students may see their teachers as role models for sustainable behavior. This presents the risk of students adopting teachers' beliefs and behaviors without reflection. Teaching sustainable nutrition is therefore in potential conflict with indoctrinating young people toward sustainable diets. To date, no studies have addressed the perceived risk of indoctrination in the context of teaching sustainable nutrition in relation to teachers' personal beliefs, behaviors, and teaching practices. Therefore, this study explored whether biology teachers themselves perceive a risk of indoctrination when teaching sustainable nutrition, and what methods they use for teaching it in a non-indoctrinating way. For this purpose, we conducted semi-structured interviews with seven in-service biology teachers from high schools in Germany. Data for this explorative qualitative study were collected from July to October 2021 using convenience sampling. These were analyzed by qualitative coding and content analysis. The preliminary results of this study show that participants recognize a high risk of indoctrination when teaching sustainable nutrition, primarily due to their own teaching actions, such as deciding whether to reveal their own dietary choices to students. While some participants believed teachers must be restrained, others thought that open communication about personal choices could benefit student decision-making skills. In terms of avoiding indoctrination when teaching sustainable nutrition, participants advocated for student-centered and multi-perspective teaching approaches. Based on the findings, initial implications for further research and teacher training are discussed.

Project description:Presents problem/focus of studyThe Covid-19 outbreak has had a staggering impact on the global economy, public health and safety, trade and education. In Malaysia, the government implemented the Movement Control Order (MCO) as a preventive measure against Covid-19. In education, the learning process has been transferred to online teaching. However, pandemic pedagogy is making learning into completely online either synchronous or asynchronous. Therefore, the current research aims to determine the secondary school teachers' psychological status, competencies in e-teaching and teachers work motivation as well as determine the relationship between secondary school teachers' psychological status and competencies in e-teaching during the Covid-19 outbreak.Design/methodology/approachCurrent research is a descriptive-correlational quantitative survey to determine teachers' psychological status, e-teaching competencies and working motivation during Movement Control Order (MCO) to contain the Covid-19 pandemic. The study sample consists of 595 secondary school teachers selected via convenient sampling. Quantitative data are collected from an online survey through the questionnaires with demographic, psychological status (stress, anxiety and depression), e-teaching competencies (teaching, monitoring and evaluation) and teaching motivation developed by the researchers were distributed during the MCO period. SPSS 25 is applied, Statistical measures such as Cronbach's alpha, means, percentage and standard deviation were employed to analyze the data to obtain the value of the school teachers' psychological status, e-teaching competencies and teaching motivation. Consequently, a Pearson correlation table was created to show the analysis of the school teachers' psychological status and competencies in e-teaching.FindingsThis finding indicated that the teachers' psychological factors in stress, anxiety and depressed are moderate, the teachers' competencies in e-teaching is moderate as well as teachers' working motivations is also the moderate level. However, the highest mean value was found among the variables, this is revealed that despite the challenges during the Covid-19 outbreak, teachers showed positive and strong motivation in conducting e-teaching. Additionally, the result showed a negative relationship between psychological status and e-teaching competencies (-0.286, p < 0.01), as well as reported a negative relationship between dimension of psychological status and competencies in e-teaching.Limitation & recommendationsThis study has its limitations. This study is included only Selangor teachers and given that the information obtained from the study was gather from secondary schools, the generalizability might be limited. future research may consider expanding the scope from secondary schools to primary schools' teachers and then to university lecturers. Perhaps the scope is expanding, so more information could be obtaining and help researchers understand the teachers' competencies in e-teaching, psychological status and work motivation.

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Teaching High School Chemistry in the Context of Pharmacology Helps Both Teachers and Students Learn.

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Teaching High School Chemistry in the Context of Pharmacology Helps Both Teachers and Students Learn.

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