Louca, Loucas T.

1/12/2010, Louca, Loucas T., Tzialli, Dora, Zacharia, C. Z.

We described and compared 94 pre-service elementary teachers' epistemologies during three different activities: one semi-structured interview, an asynchronous on-line discussion about a physics problem and their reflection on the discussion of the second activity. Using discourse-based analysis, we analyzed the data in terms of the teachers' underlying epistemologies and findings revealed significant differences across the three activities. This suggests that (a) teachers' epistemologies might be better understood as finer grained cognitive resources whose activation is sensitive to the context, unlike most research which views them as coherent and stable cognitive structures, and that (b) the research community is far from settling the debate as to what particular approaches should be used to assess or study personal epistemologies. Depending on the context and the manner of investigation, students and teachers may "show" different epistemological understanding.

1/12/2012, Louca, Loucas T., Skoulia, T., Tzialli, Dora

Inquiry-based teaching requires that teachers pay attention to their students' ideas and reasoning, and adapt their instruction accordingly. We analyzed 16 80-minute science lessons from 42 pre-service elementary teachers working in groups, in order to investigate "teacher noticing and responding" (TNR) abilities relating to student inquiry. Findings suggest that the pre-service teachers were able to identify and respond to a variety of aspects of their students' inquiry, although we identified disagreements between what they responded to and what we considered important aspects of student inquiry. These findings highlight an ongoing disagreement with prior research, which suggests that teachers' TNR abilities develop with time and teaching experience. Consequently we propose a general need for a better understanding of teacher cognition and development.

1/12/2010, Louca, Loucas T., Santis, M., Tzialli, Dora

Despite calls for student-centered, inquiry-based instruction in science, science teacher preparation remains mostly teacher-centered, with the underlying assumption that novice teachers need to form a teaching identity before attending to their students' inquiry. In this paper, we use the idea of framing to analyze a 42-minute science lesson of a senior kindergarten student-teacher. Findings suggest that the student-teacher struggled for balance between teaching science as implementing a lesson plan, and as attending to her students' inquiry. We use this evidence to suggest that novice teachers can attend to students' inquiry as early as in their student-teaching experience, which suggests additional pressure on the need for preparation in teaching science. Thus, the role of science methods courses should be to help students understand the different interpretations of teaching within the different frames and provide them with strategies for entering more productive frames during teaching.

2012-08-01, Louca, Loucas T., Zacharia, Zacharias C., Tzialli, Dora

Although research has come to recognize the importance of studying classroom-based student-teacher discourse in science, the emphasis remains largely on teachers' abilities to ask questions and provide students with feedback, or on students' abilities to ask questions or engage in argumentative discourse. Consequently, little research has focused on the discourse elements relating to teacher-student discourse interactions. In this article, we argue for a shift of research attention toward describing what the teacher is responding to (Identification of student inquiry), the process of deciding how to respond (Interpretation-Evaluation of student inquiry), and how the teacher is responding (Response to student inquiry). We propose a new methodological approach for studying teacher discourse, which involves a framework we developed while analyzing 1,385 minutes of fifth grade, whole-class science conversations covering a 2-year period and facilitated by an experienced science teacher. Then, as a case in point, we applied our framework to the teacher discourse data of the study, aiming to show that the framework can be a useful tool for examining how a teacher supports students' inquiry.

1/12/2008, Louca, Loucas T., Tzialli, Dora, Zacharia, Zacharias C.

The first aim of this study was to contribute to a growing body of research in teacher-student classroom discourse, by describing, in detail, the discourse "moves" of a teacher during science conversations. Our second aim was to develop an enriched analytic framework that can account for the context, the content and the purpose of the discourse moves identified, arguing for a shift of attention in research toward the process of deciding which discourse move to use, rather than solely their description. We analyzed a total of 930 minutes of whole-class conversations facilitated by an experienced science teacher over two years of elementary science lessons. The findings revealed a repertoire of discourse moves that the teacher chose from during instruction based on the context and the epistemological properties of the student discourse content, supporting our contention for the need of a framework that can describe the nature of those choices.

1/12/2012, Louca, Loucas T., Tzialli, Dora, Constantinou, P. C.

Twenty kindergarten in-service teachers participated in a 25hr professional development program (PDP) supporting the development of abilities for identifying and responding to students' in-class inquiry. Each teacher taught a science lesson at the beginning and at the end of the PDP. These were videotaped and analyzed in terms of the student inquiry the teachers responded to. Findings suggest that average student talk duration increased and students' leads were increasingly used to guide lesson flow. Teachers increased responses to students' reasoning and logic, offered more clarifications to students' ideas and reasoning, and decreased evaluations of students' ideas. However, teacher responses to knowledge claims increased and those to everyday experiences decreased.