DEVELOPMENT OF AN INSTRUMENT TO DETERMINE SCIENCE TEACHERS’ IMPLEMENTATION OF INQUIRY BASED SCIENCE EDUCATION IN THEIR CLASSROOMS

Abstract

The main aim of this article is to develop and validate an instrument on the usage of scientific inquiry by science and technology teachers in their classroom. The questionnaire was developed on the basis of literature review and regarding the instruments developed so far on the inquiry based science education (IBSE). The first version of the questionnaire was in English to get international experts group’s opinion. Then the instrument was translated into Turkish. The Turkish translated version of questionnaire was distributed to 788 Turkish science teachers who work in public schools in Turkey. As a result of the instrument development process, the instrument consists of 27 Likert-type items that rank their teaching and learning facilities according to how often the teachers apply in their classroom. The instrument was found to be internally consistent with high reliability scores. The result of the factor analyzes showed three factors that the items were clustered into three categories namely structured, guided and open inquiry. The results of this study revealed that the instrument is useful for the assessing the extent to which science teachers using scientific inquiry in their classroom. The results provide evidences that the instrument is valid for further implementation on a wider scale and in larger samples.

Keywords: Inquiry based science education (IBSE), science teacher, Instrument.

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