Biology teachers' beliefs about science and school science and their perceptions of the science laboratory learning environment were investigated with an assumption that science laboratory teaching would be affected by science teachers; beliefs and at...
Biology teachers' beliefs about science and school science and their perceptions of the science laboratory learning environment were investigated with an assumption that science laboratory teaching would be affected by science teachers; beliefs and attitudes. Likert-scale questionnaires of BASSSQ and SLEI were used in this study. The major findings were as follows: 1. Biology teachers showed inconsistent beliefs about science and school science. Their reponses reflected a patch-like view of postmodern epistemology and objectivism. They also showed somewhat different views about science and school science. It was found that biology teachers had strong objectivist views about science in some parts, but they had moderate constructivist views about school science in other parts; 2. The mean scores of student cohesiveness, integration, and rule clarity on the actual version in SLEI were relatively high, but those of open-endedness and physical environment were very low; 3. There was no association between teachers' beliefs about science and school science, and their perceptions of the actual science laboratory learning environment. And there were statistically meaningful correlations on three scale of student cohesiveness, integration, and rule clarity between perceived learning environment and preferred learning environment. We could not show a causal relationship among teachers' beliefs, attitude and their science laboratory learning environment do have a role in constructing a desirable science laboratory learning environment, as we found that there were statistically correlations between them.