‘Beating about the bush’ on the how and why in elementary school science

Britt Jakobson and Monica Axelsson examine teacher instruction on scientific literacy tasks and teacher expression of ultimate and subordinate purposes during one teaching sequence of a science unit. They use a Practical Epistemology Analysis and Systemic Functional Grammar and transcribed audio recordings of teacher instruction, students’ pair work and written texts. In conclusion, students are mainly involved in hands-on activities and aspects of scientific literacy are not so emphasised. The dominant focus is on “doing”, and the authors argue that this is creating uncertainty and that the learning direction is not always in line with what the teacher intended.

Författare: Britt Jakobson & Monica Axelsson

‘Beating about the bush’ on the how and why in elementary school science

Education Inquiry, Volume 3, No. 4, December 2012