The effectiveness of an outreach intervention to provide teachers with the skills to implement practical and experimental work in their classes

Abstract

Practical work in Science is considered to be an important component of science education. However, teachers in poor schools in the rural areas generally find it difficult to conduct practical work. An outreach project ‘Science for Rural Communities’ was launched to address this problem. The purpose of this study was to investigate the nature and coherence of the project and its influence on science teachers’ content knowledge, skills and classroom practice. The research is situated within a qualitative interpretive paradigm and has adopted an evaluative research design, underpinned by grounded theory as a method of analysis. The use of an evaluative framework normally used for curriculum innovation was adapted for the exploration of impact of the teachers’ professional development project. Teachers reported that they benefitted from participation in the project in various ways, such as increased conceptual understanding of science knowledge, improved practical skills and enhanced confidence. However, there were some inconsistencies identified in terms of project intentions and project outcomes. The suitability of the evaluation framework for teacher professional development programmes is discussed