THE IMPORTANCE OF AFFECTIVE LEARNING GOALS: LESSONS LEARNED BRINGING INQUIRY INTO A GEOSCIENCE LAB FOR PRESERVICE PRIMARY TEACHERS (Invited Presentation)

The challenges of teaching science to preservice elementary teachers include an overall negative and disinterested attitude about science that translates to future teachers who do not teach science confidently and/or teach it superficially and hurriedly compared to other subjects. College-level science courses for preservice teachers have an opportunity to reverse this trend and help create teachers who are knowledgeable about science and enjoy teaching it. In this presentation, we discuss the hybrid model of an online course and an engaging, hands-on, student-centered, inquiry-based lab that was developed, implemented, and evolved over eight years. The lab activities were developed to address both content and affective goals. These goals were to provide students with a solid foundation in Earth and Space Science (E&SS) content and to make them comfortable teaching science. We worked to balance the required E&SS content with a creative use of materials and resources that met college-level science objectives while presenting methods and ideas that could be brought into an elementary classroom and meet Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) requirements. Designed around the principle of student-centered learning, the lab included activities, both guided and inquiry-based, designed to foster hands-on learning while maintaining open lines of communication. In this type of learning, the teacher is primarily a facilitator rather than a lecturer, and this learning includes both content knowledge and development of higher-order thinking skills.

An assessment of the affective goals shows that the lab, in particular, increased preservice teachers’ level of confidence to teach these topics, and students generally found the lab to be enjoyable. In addition to consistently high course grades as a means for evaluating our E&SS content goal, course evaluations suggest that the students felt they learned a substantial amount and found lab activities useful. However, more work needs to be done to assess the content knowledge of this group of students, highlighting the need for developing a validated instrument that covers the breadth of E&SS content included in the NGSS for elementary grades.