Features and trends of teaching strategies for scientific practices from a review of 2008–2017 articles

This study analyzed 2008–2017 articles in primary science education journals to explore the features and trends of teaching strategies for scientific practices. Five criteria were used to select the articles: (1) emphasizing inquiry teaching in either the theoretical framework or the findings section, (2) incorporating teaching strategies into inquiry teaching or professional development, (3) selecting science as subject matter, (4) being empirical research, and (5) not including special needs or ESL (English as Second Language) students as participants. Based on the above criteria, 310 articles were selected for further coding in the dimensions of teaching strategies and teaching goals. The teaching goals for the usage of the teaching strategies for scientific practices include affective, epistemic and sociocultural goals. Two categories of teaching strategies were coded for scientific practices including student-centered and teacher-centered strategies. The results showed that student-centered teaching strategies were adopted more than teacher-centered strategies; and experimenting, discussing, and a combination of experimenting and discussing were the most used teaching strategies, which were mostly used to achieve the cognitive and affective teaching goals. This was an increasing trend over the past 10 years. Moreover, teaching strategies for scientific practice have large, positive effects on the cognitive aspect.