Acknowledgements

This study is funded by Mobilitas post-doctoral research grant by the Council of the Estonian Science Foundation; and the S-TEAM Project: A coordination and support action under FP7, SiS 2008, action 2.2.1.1, Innovative Methods in Science Education.

Appendix 1. The in-service program

As shown in Table A1, the professional development program consists of three 2-day meetings (November 2009, January 2010, and March 2010) and two periods of practicing trial lessons between the meetings at participant schools. In the trial lessons designed as a result of the planning sections, the participant teachers were supported through e-mail and the author’s school visits. Each meeting was organized in the form of seminar, hand-on workshop, lesson planning, open discussion, or teacher presentation. The listed theoretical topics of instructions were chosen based on its relevancy to inquiry teaching and feasibility in science classes. Since the program aimed at teacher’s collaborative reflections, relevant group works and materials were organized with regard to each topic.

Table A1. The in-service teacher program and collaborative reflections

Type / Topic / Collaborative reflections
1st meeting in November 2009
Seminar / Science inquiry and Finnish curriculum, levels of inquiry teaching, ICT usage and inquiry / Reflecting participant teacher’s prior responses about inquiry teaching transcribed from the semi-structured interview
Seminar / Inquiry and inquiry teaching, The nature of science, 5 E’s Model / Comparing example videos of inquiry teaching by the Annenburg project (US) and a participant teacher (Finland)
Workshop / Reasoning based on HRASE / Hand-on activity in group
Planning / Co-planning of inquiry lessons (1st), Integration of student feedback on the day of practice / Lesson planning and its discussion in group
Practicing the lesson plan and collecting student feedback in each school
2nd meeting in January 2010
Presentation / Group reflection of the first trial lesson / Participant teacher’s presentation of an trial lesson followed by collaborative reflection
Open discussion / Analysis of student feedback / Reflection of student feedback on the 22 items measuring motivation of the science lesson
Seminar / Inquiry by reading and writing / Group discussion on “Which aspects could support inquiry teaching in reading and writing activities?”
Seminar / Student learning motivation, Self-Determinant theory / Group discussion on “Which aspect of inquiry do you think is linked to student motivation?”
Planning / Co-planning of inquiry lessons (2nd), Integration of videotaping on the day of the practice / Group planning and open discussion of each plan
Practicing the lesson plan and collecting student feedback in each school
3rd meeting in March 2010
Presentation / Group reflection of the second trial lesson / Participant teacher’s presentation of an inquiry lesson with collaborative reflection
Seminar / POE-inquiry method
Seminar / Industry site visit and inquiry
Workshop / Teacher’s previous belief and the trial lessons of inquiry teaching / Identifying situations in which a teacher felt stimulation and reinforcement from the colleagues; Discussing about the teacher’s interviews that match the progress model

Appendix 2. Semi-structured interview protocol

Based on Bell et al. (2005) and Linn et al. (2003), the protocol of the semi-structured interview was designed to ask four main components about whether a teacher encourages her/his students to seek questions, design investigations, derive models, and communicate with peers. Other similar questions were added in the sub-questions (Table A2).

Table A2. The protocol of the semi-structured interview derived from Bell et al. (2005) and Linn et al. (2003)

1. Constructing questions
Do you encourage students to ask questions?
Do you encourage students to question the nature?
Do you develop your students’ questions or answer them directly?
2. Designing investigations
Do you encourage students to plan their own investigations?
Do you encourage students to do practical work?
Do you give students detailed instructions of their investigation?
Do you encourage students to search for relevant information by experiment or from the media?
Do you encourage students to search for information in laboratory settings such as practical work, demonstrations, or small-scale research?
Do you encourage students to search for information in textual materials such as textbooks, the Internet, magazines, or newspapers?
Do you encourage students to visit sites or meet experts?
What other sources of information or methods do you encourage students to use?
3. Deriving models
Do you encourage students to draw conclusions from their experiment?
Do you encourage students to test their ideas?
Do you encourage students to construct models?
Do you encourage students to explain phenomena?
Do you encourage students to use concept maps?
Do you encourage students to model their findings?
Do you encourage students to explain their ideas?
4. Communicating with peers
Do you encourage students to work with peers?
Do you encourage students to argue with each other?
Do you encourage students to evaluate different arguments in the science class?
Do you encourage students to debate?
Do you encourage students to report their findings in practical work?
Do you encourage students to negotiate the meanings of concepts or phenomena?

Appendix 3. Video summarization

The science lessons of the four participant teachers were analyzed by graphical cues. The movie player Totem ( running on the open-source operating system Ubuntu 9.10 performed the video summarization and produced 30 key frames for each teacher. This method produced each block map of the segmented analyses from the four teachers, which were matched with the first author’s field notes. Prior to the in-service program, this study analyzed the classroom video from the four participant teachers. For example, Mali’s science lesson lasted approximately 2400 seconds, so the 2-dimensional block map presented 30 key frames for every 80 seconds (Figure A1). The field notes were matched to the block map to visualize the proportion of time she spent on specific segments of her instruction during the science lesson and the content of each segmented instruction (Table A3). During the (second) stimulated recall interview, each figure and analysis was presented to the teachers to obtain their approval that the data were representative.

For the teacher’s presentation that lasted for six hours during the program, the author and the chairperson of the session analyzed the video using the textual descriptor cues, producing a condensed transcript of each presentation and the group discussion.

Figure A1. An example of the graphical cues captured during Mali’s science lesson (running 40 minutes 13 seconds) and segment analysis approved by the interviewee

Table A3. Consistency of beliefs and practices, validated by the graphical cues

Teacher / Graphical cues of a lesson video
(time portion divided by 30 blocks) / Consistency with the interview
Reena / opening presentation (11/30); student activity (7/30); self-reporting on textbook (7/30); closing lecture (5/30) / As interviewed (R2), student’s learning from textbooks was important for 7/30th of the lesson.
Kai / opening presentation (9/30); role setting (3/30); group activity (19/30) / As interviewed (K2, K4), To provoke group discussion, Kai promoted student discussion by setting roles in each group: a leader, assistants, and a scribe.
Lotti / teacher’s demonstration (6/30); student activity (21/30); summary with class (3/30) / After she had demonstrated the experiment, students followed her instruction in the lesson.
Mali / student’s activity and documenting (9/30); teacher’s authentic demonstration (9/30); demonstration of optical illusion by asking quizzes (12/30) / As interviewed (M3, M4), Mali endeavored to teach students with scientific concepts and to guide them to focus on the main topics of experiments.

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