Research project

Eye-Inquire: Uncovering insights from expert teachers for effective Climate Change Education through Socio-Scientific Inquiry-Based Learning

Project overview

Climate change has been a global issue that warrants urgent research and educational attention. The complexity between science, human, and environment makes Climate Change a real socio-scientific issue enabling students to build up knowledge, shape values, and take actions. To ensure student learning quality, it is important to uncover how expert science teachers design and accommodate students’ Socio-Scientific Issues through inquiry-based learning. To apply for the ESRC-NSTC Collaboration Award 2023, two research teams are allied by scholars from National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) and University of Southampton (UOS) with a common goal to share research expertise through offering workshops and collaboratively working on science education. The two teams would like to take a one-year period to build collaboration networks in facilitating science teachers’ professional development and investigating their instructional expertise.

The project proposed to uncover how expert teachers support students’ Socio-Scientific Inquiry-Based Learning (SSIBL) on the topic of Climate Change. The two research teams have been renowned for their long-term research work in fields of inquiry, socio-scientific issues (SSI), technology-enhanced teaching, eye-tracking, so the joint project allows them to exchange research expertise. To fully understand teachers’ behaviors (expert teachers v.s. novice teachers) made from their design thinking and instructional decisions, the collected data will include teacher journal entries before, during and after the lessons, teachers’ attentional behavior collected from eye-tracking glasses, teacher-student classroom interactions, and teachers’ post-lesson think-alouds, in addition to student learning logs in online learning platforms. These data will be coded and quantitatively modeled through an epistemic network analysis in order to capture a holistic understanding and explore connectivity patterns of expert teachers’ instructional behaviors in facilitating student learning.

Staff

Lead researchers

Dr Nora McIntyre PhD

Associate Professor

Research interests

  • Educational effectiveness
  • Educational technology
  • Innovative research methods: eye-tracking, big data
Connect with Nora
Other researchers

Emeritus Professor Marcus Grace

Professor of Science Education

Research interests

  • The science and values underpinning education for biodiversity, sustainable development and citizenship
  • Adolescent decision-making, and teaching and learning about socio-scientific issues
  • Outdoor science education
Connect with Marcus

Dr Andri Christodoulou

Associate Professor

Research interests

  • Argumentation within scientific and socio-scientific contexts
  • Dialogic teaching
  • Socio-scientific inquiry-based learning
Connect with Andri

Collaborating research institutes, centres and groups

Research outputs