First-year Life Sciences students’ preparedness for the laboratory learning environment

Abstract

Higher Education Institutions in South Africa has teacher education and training been enrolling students as preservice teachers in first year Natural Science Education disciplines of which one Life Sciences Education is one of them in their undergraduate studies. These first-year students are coming from different schooling backgrounds. Some schools are no-fee paying schools which have been categorized as quintile 1 to 3 systems which are categorized by low-income families, while others are coming from the well-resourced quintile 4 to 5 system which service the middle socio-economic and higher socio-economic. The lower quintile schools rely on the subsidy given to them to teach and hence they have been viewed as disadvantaged schools because of poor infrastructure and inadequate material for adequate teaching and learning. These facts continue to prevail even though, South Africa, as a nation, has moved past 25 years of democracy. These divisions in schooling backgrounds have had a contribution in disparities in students entering the universities to enrol for a Bachelor Education with the aim of becoming sciences educators once they qualify as teachers. Students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds continue to lag behind those students who are coming from well-resourced schools. Such disparities in first year classes at the university where this study was conducted has been a source of low throughput rates and higher attrition rates in the universities which is viewed as a cause of concern. In first year Life Sciences such differences in schooling experience based on the social and economic status of these students has been seen as a source of struggle in not only the content knowledge of the Life Sciences discipline but has been seen as posing a challenge of exposure of first year Life Sciences students to laboratory environment and practical skills which is gained in conducting experiments, being involved in a learning processes through inquiry plus investigative scientific skills expected from the envisaged natural Sciences and Life Sciences produced by the current teacher education and training curriculum. Schools also expect teachers to perform as 21st century science educators endowed with adequate skills that will assist them to be competent teachers. Exposure to practical work and working in the laboratories before enrolling for a Life Education at schools contributes to preparedness of Life Science education students for investigative skills and enable them to participate at ease in inquiry-based activities in the first year in the Life Sciences Education class at university level. This study is aimed at investigating first year Life Sciences education students for adequate and beneficial learning of Life Sciences education through laboratory environment. In light of this, the researcher set out to answer the question: firstly, seeking out factors that influence first year Life Sciences students’ preparedness for the laboratory environment at a university that trains and educate Life Sciences preservice teacher. Linking to this question, the research explored how these first year Life Sciences education students demonstrate their levels of preparedness when doing their practical activities in a laboratory environment as well as the researcher also exploring ways of reducing gaps between students in a first year practical class which can be narrowed down to the extent of levelling the field for all students irrespective of where they did their secondary education. Theory of Bourdieu of social and scientific capital provided the researcher lenses to interpret and analyse data collected through qualitative research methods within the interpretivist research paradigm. A purposive sample of four groups of five participants (n=20) was selected from a population of 91 Life Sciences first year students for focused group in-depth interviews. To address trustworthiness of the data and findings obtained from the study, triangulation was done using instruments; non-participant observations when students were conducting practical activities in the laboratory. Two practical worksheets were randomly selected on the first and last microscopic practical activities and data obtained from these was used to analyse drawing and conceptualization skills of the participants. Data obtained from the interviews were interpreted through using open codes, so themes were generated and discussed in view of literature review and theoretical framework. This study unveiled that there were indeed gaps between students coming from the two schooling backgrounds (upper and lower quintile schools). Another major finding on the study was that students displayed variable skills and conceptual understanding which agreed with the Bourdieu theory of social capital which was seen in this study as contributing to scientific capital. It was further concluded that absence of exposure to resources needed to conduct practical investigations had an impact on lesser confidence levels of students who were mostly doubting themselves when conducting practical activities. When a guided inquiry was used as a strategy to engage students in doing practical work, results obtained from practical activities did not differ much with the results obtained by students coming from well-resourced schools. Students obtained similar results when they were given a complex practical activity (plant tissue microscopic activity) at the end of the year. This study recommends that to understand that there are different backgrounds in knowledge of students when they come to university from secondary schools that a baseline assessment needs to be administered to students to get an understanding of competence in the fundamental practical skills like, drawing skills, labelling skills also engaging students on activities that will challenge them to engage in inquiry-based learning. Early detection of knowledge and skills gaps in the students first year Life Sciences practical work could benefit students with skills that they need through various scaffolding methods. Laboratory learning requires pedagogies that will ultimately allow students who were struggling initially into better achievers. It is further recommended that schools need to be consistently checked whether practical work prescribed in the school curriculum is being completed and that curriculum advisors should be aware of conditions of lack of resources and the capacity of teachers to conduct the practical work prescribed. Once students are exposed to inquiry-based teaching and learning, skills like critical thinking are more likely to come more naturally to them.