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[SLIDES] Identifying Complexity in Biology Teachers' Beliefs about Teaching Cancer Education
Abstract
talk given at the ESERA 2017 Conference in Dublin, Ireland
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This study relied on the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to identify the beliefs that influence young people’s pro-environmental behavior. High-school students completed a questionnaire regarding the performance of pro-environmental behaviors early in the school year and reported on their behavior toward the end of the year. In addition to the standard TPB constructs, the initial questionnaire assessed descriptive norms, moral norms, sex, and empathic concern. Results revealed an excellent fit for the standard TPB model; attitudes, descriptive subjective norms, and perceptions of control made independent contributions to the prediction of intentions, and intentions together with perceived control predicted behavior. Behavioral, normative, and control beliefs predicted, respectively, attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control. Empathic concern influenced intentions and behavior indirectly by its effects on behavioral, normative, and control beliefs. Examination of the effects of specific beliefs revealed important implications for designing effective behavior-change interventions.
This work reports the findings of the Professional Competence of Teachers, Cognitively Activating Instruction, and Development of Students' Mathematical Literacy project (COACTIV). COACTIV applies a broad, innovative conceptualization of teacher competence to examine how mathematics teachers' knowledge, beliefs, motivational orientations, and self-regulation skills influence their instructional practice and teaching outcomes In this project data was collected on various aspects of teacher competence and classroom instruction from the perspective of both the teachers themselves and their students. Moreover, it gauges the effects of these teacher characteristics on student learning, as indexed by the progress students in each class. Questions addressed in the study which are reported in this volume include: What are the characteristics of successful teaching? What distinguishes teachers who succeed in their profession? How can the quality of instruction be improved? © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013. All rights reserved.
Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, and thus represents a priority for national public health programs. Prevention has been assumed as the best strategy to reduce cancer burden, however most cancer prevention programs are implemented by healthcare professionals, which constrain range and educational impacts.
We developed an innovative approach for cancer prevention education focused on high-school biology teachers, considered privileged mediators in the socialization processes. A training program, “Cancer, Educate to Prevent” was applied, so that the teachers were able to independently develop and implement prevention campaigns focused on students and school-related communities. The program encompassed different educational modules, ranging from cancer biology to prevention campaigns design. Fifty-four teachers were empowered to develop and implement their own cancer prevention campaigns in a population up to five thousands students.
The success of the training program was assessed through quantitative evaluation – questionnaires focused on teachers' cancer knowledge and perceptions, before the intervention (pre-test) and immediately after (post-test). The projects developed and implemented by teachers were also evaluated regarding the intervention design, educational contents and impact on the students' knowledge about cancer. This study presents and discusses the results concerning the training program “Cancer, Educate to Prevent” and clearly shows a significant increase in teacher's cancer literacy (knowledge and perceptions) and teachers' acquired proficiency to develop and deliver cancer prevention campaigns with direct impact on students' knowledge about cancer.
This pilot study reinforces the potential of high-school teachers and schools as cancer prevention promoters and opens a new perspective for the development and validation of cancer prevention education strategies, based upon focused interventions in restricted targets (students) through non-health professionals (teachers).
Non-communicable diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, and chronic cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, remain a major cause of mortality and morbidity worldwide resulting in more than 36 million deaths annually. Of primary importance in the reduction of this pain and suffering is the local use of education to eliminate misconception, enable prevention, reduce the associated social stigmas, and prepare a workforce that can care for its own people as well as feed an economic engine helping to combat the poverty that so often determines the availability and quality of care. The need to develop these local capabilities is especially acute for children, as 80% of pediatric cancer cases occur in low- and middle-income countries, places where the survival rates are lowest.
PubMed
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=22910494
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https://books.google.com/books?id=RkVTp8fpyTsC&pg=PA3&dq=10.3233/978-1-61499-088-8-3&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMI3ML0xv7OxwIVhnk-Ch32OQet#v=onepage&q=10.3233%2F978-1-61499-088-8-3&f=false
Die Diskussion über die professionelle Handlungskompetenz von Lehrkräften – ihre Dimensionen, Struktur und Genese – verläuft in Deutschland in sehr unterschiedlichen, sich praktisch nicht berührenden Bahnen. Entsprechend divergent sind die Ergebnisse, aber auch die Folgerungen, die daraus für die Aus- und Fortbildung von Lehrkräften gezogen werden. Auf der einen Seite stehen die Autoren, die pädagogisches Handeln im Lehrerberuf im Anschluss an Oevermanns Analyse der Struktur psychotherapeutischer Beziehungen als quasi-therapeutische Tätigkeit auffassen wollen.
Previous research has documented that students who engage with socioscientific issues can acquire some of the complex competences and skills typically related to scientific literacy. But an emerging field of research on science teachers’ understanding and use of socioscientific issues, has documented that a range of challenges hinders the uptake of socioscientific issues. In this study, we investigated the interpretation and implementation of socioscientific issues among Danish biology teachers. We conducted five in-depth group interviews and validated the emergent themes from the teachers’ talk-in-interaction by distributing a questionnaire. Our findings suggest that the participating teachers generally harbour a content-centred interpretation of socioscientific issues which manifests itself in at least three separate ways. First, the teachers generally use socioscientific issues as a vehicle to teach factual biological content. Second, the teachers emphasised mastery of factual content in their assessment. Third, the teachers tended to reduce socioscientific issues to specific biological contents in a way may preclude students from engaging with the real socioscientific issue. Our findings are particularly significant for science educators, policy-makers and curriculum designers, as we argue that key aspects of this content-centred interpretation may be a coping strategy used to navigate a divided curriculum.
The dawn of the twenty-first century encouraged a number of scientific and technological organisations to identify what they saw as 'Grand Challenges and Opportunities'. Issues of environment and health featured very prominently in these quite short lists, as can be seen from a sample of these challenges in Table 1. Indeed, the first two lists of challenges in Table 1 were identified as for the environment and for health, respectively. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. All rights reserved.
This book describes the reasoned action approach, an integrative framework for the prediction and change of human social behavior. it provides an up-to-date review of relevant research, discusses critical issues related to the reasoned action framework, and provides methodological and conceptual tools for the prediction and explanation of social behavior and for designing behavior change interventions.
• The research on teachers' beliefs, to our knowledge, spans more than 57 years and runs the gamut of research methodologies, theoretical perspectives, and identification of specific beliefs about any number of topics. In this chapter, we consolidate the topics of beliefs that have been addressed, reveal how teachers' beliefs are defined, and synthesize trends in empirical findings across research paradigms. We focus on empirical investigations of teachers' beliefs and seminal reviews. Previous reviews or commentaries on the field of teachers' beliefs have carved the field into manageable chunks to make meaning. For instance, Thompson focused on quantitative studies of teachers' beliefs related to mathematics, whereas Kagan reviewed longitudinal studies of preservice and novice teachers. In contrast, our perspective is broad and spans multiple disciplinary perspectives. On the basis of this analysis, we identified a pervasive concern related to a lack of agreement regarding the nature of teachers' beliefs. We also found that most studies either related teachers' beliefs to their practice or examined changes in teachers' beliefs, typically as the result of an intervention. In this chapter, we include a discussion of what teacher beliefs are in which we address findings related to the topic of teachers' beliefs as well as a consideration of how this construct is defined and characterized. We then discuss the research that relates teachers' beliefs to practice and studies of belief change. We offer recommendations for researchers, teacher educators, school leaders, and teachers. We conclude with open questions about the field. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved)
• The research on teachers' beliefs, to our knowledge, spans more than 57 years and runs the gamut of research methodologies, theoretical perspectives, and identification of specific beliefs about any number of topics. In this chapter, we consolidate the topics of beliefs that have been addressed, reveal how teachers' beliefs are defined, and synthesize trends in empirical findings across research paradigms. We focus on empirical investigations of teachers' beliefs and seminal reviews. Previous reviews or commentaries on the field of teachers' beliefs have carved the field into manageable chunks to make meaning. For instance, Thompson focused on quantitative studies of teachers' beliefs related to mathematics, whereas Kagan reviewed longitudinal studies of preservice and novice teachers. In contrast, our perspective is broad and spans multiple disciplinary perspectives. On the basis of this analysis, we identified a pervasive concern related to a lack of agreement regarding the nature of teachers' beliefs. We also found that most studies either related teachers' beliefs to their practice or examined changes in teachers' beliefs, typically as the result of an intervention. In this chapter, we include a discussion of what teacher beliefs are in which we address findings related to the topic of teachers' beliefs as well as a consideration of how this construct is defined and characterized. We then discuss the research that relates teachers' beliefs to practice and studies of belief change. We offer recommendations for researchers, teacher educators, school leaders, and teachers. We conclude with open questions about the field. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved)
The research is an investigation of teachers’ experience of working with socio-scientific issues (SSI). A large group of teachers (55) chose one of six cases with the characteristics of SSI and were free to organize the work as they found appropriate. The research focuses on how teachers chose content, organized their work and experienced the students’ interest and learning. The teachers answered a questionnaire after working with the cases and seven of them were interviewed to provide in-depth understanding of issues raised in the questionnaire. The teachers found the SSI to be current topics with interesting content and relevant tasks and they felt confident about the work. They were quite content with the students’ learning of scientific facts, how to apply scientific knowledge and to search for information. However, they found that the students did not easily formulate questions, critically examine arguments or use media to obtain information about the task. The interviewed teachers did not find this work new, but they organized it as ‘a special event’. They understood SSI work as ‘free’ work and group work was frequent, but only a few of the teachers developed explicit strategies for teaching SSI. They had different ideas about learning but they all talked about knowledge as a set of facts to be taken in by the students. They all included elements of SSI but mostly to introduce the regular science content. However the teachers started to reflect upon the potential of using SSI to cover more goals in the curriculum.
Data were collected from 1024 teachers from secondary schools throughout England and Wales. The sample included teachers of all National Curriculum subjects, and analysis revealed that cancer was most often taught about in science or personal and social education (PSE). There was a significant association between the teachers’ knowledge of cancer and their involvement in cancer education. Teachers who showed a greater awareness of cancer issues are more likely to have taught about cancer than their less knowledgeable colleagues. Data are also available on why some teachers had not taught about cancer. It appeared that the teachers’ lack of knowledge and the poor supply of educational resources were primary factors. The authors conclude that these issues must be addressed if there is to be an increase in cancer education. This can only occur within the broader context of training and support for general school health education.
The theory of planned behavior presents clear operational definitions of attitudes, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, and each of their corresponding belief-based measures. Theoretically, the direct and indirect measures of a given construct must be closely correlated. Empirical results, however, indicate that this is not always the case. In the present study, 2 of the factors that could be responsible for this situation-namely, the scaling of the variables defining each belief-based construct and the adequacy of using an expectancy-value model within the belief-based measures-were verified among a data set of 16 studies concerned with the application of the theory of planned behavior to the field of health. The results indicate that the scaling method used affected the correlation coefficients between indirect and direct measures. However, the face validity of these scaling methods must be demonstrated. The results also support the idea that, in most cases, using the expectancy-value model is no better than using only one arm of the belief-based measure.
This article examines the multiplicative combination of belief strength by outcome evaluation in the expectancy–value model of attitudes. Because linear transformation of a belief strength measure results in a nonlinear transformation of its product with outcome evaluation, use of unipolar or bipolar scoring must be empirically justified. Also, the claim that the Belief × Evaluation product fails to explain significant variance in attitudes is found to be baseless. In regression analyses, the main effect of belief strength takes account of the outcome's valence, and the main effect of outcome evaluation incorporates the outcome's perceived likelihood. Simulated data showed that multiplication adds substantially to the prediction of attitudes only when belief and evaluation measures cover the full range of potential scores.
Various attempts have been made at encouraging cancer education in British schools, and while some have had limited success, there is still a reluctance amongst teachers to adopt this subject in the classroom. The study discussed in this paper was an attempt to ascertain the current status of cancer education in English secondary education. Over 1,200 English secondary (11-16 years olds) schools took part and the data were collected between February and June 1990. Although there is evidence to suggest an element of self-selection, results from this sample indicate a growing commitment and enthusiasm for cancer education, in comparison to previous, similar studies. Over half the teachers had taught about cancer and 68.8% rated it an important health education topic. However, cancer did rate lowest out of a variety of health issues. Several reasons for this are discussed and all appear to relate to teachers' negative attitudes toward cancer, apparently based on preconception and misinformation. These must be overcome if cancer education is to achieve its true potential in English schools.
Questionnaires were used to measure health education teachers' perceptions of the potential scope and relative priority of cancer education in UK schools. The results indicate that a majority (64%) of such teachers would be supportive, in principle, of both the theory and practice of school cancer education. However, the results also indicate that teachers do have reservations about the possible side effects of teaching about the cancers and about their relative importance in comparison to other health and ill-health topics. The qualitative findings strongly suggest that part of the explanation for these reservations lies in the assumption that all teaching about disease must employ negative methods and messages.
Many adult behaviors and attitudes develop in early childhood. There is a growing acceptance of the need for health education of children of primary school age. Cancer is an important topic within health education, and this study was designed to assess the level of cancer education in schools. Data were collected from a randomly selected sample of over 1,000 teachers of children in primary school years 3-6 (ages 7-11 years). Cancer had been taught about by 18% of the sample, and their pupils' ages had no significant effect on whether they had taught about cancer. Cancer was most often taught about in response to a real-life situation, and the majority of the teachers did not use cancer education resources to help them. The study sought to ascertain why so many teachers had taught about cancer. It appears that concerns over their own lack of personal knowledge, and a perceived lack of resources, were the most common reasons. The young age of the pupils was also a deterrent to cancer education, especially among the teachers of the younger pupils. The results indicate various interventions that may increase the level of primary-school-based cancer education. These include improving teachers' awareness of cancer education issues and providing appropriate cancer education resources.
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