Liam Guilfoyle, a PhD Researcher in EPI•STEM, was recently awarded a fellowship from the International History, Philosophy, and Science Teaching Group to attend their European Regional Conference in Flensburg, Germany. The conference will be held at the Europa-Universität in Flensburg, August 22nd – 25th 2016.
The International History, Philosophy, and Science Teaching Group was formed in 1987. The group is concerned to promote the betterment of school and university science and mathematics education by making them informed by the history, philosophy, and sociology of science and mathematics. It has a particular interest in bringing these spheres of knowledge into teacher-education programmes.
Liam will present findings from his doctoral research, which is supervised by both Prof. Sibel Erduran and Dr. Orla McCormack. This research explores how science teachers’ use epistemic beliefs in science and education studies to justify their acceptance or rejection of Education Studies as a useful part of their professional knowledge base. The paper reports data from a Discipline-Focused Epistemic Belief Questionnaire (Hofer 2000) with 57 pre-service science teachers and subsequent in-depth semi-structured interviews with 12 teachers. The unique finding of this study is that science teachers appear to draw on epistemic beliefs about science in order to justify negative criticism of knowledge from Education Studies components of their teacher education.
For updates of the conference as it happens:
Search the hashtag #IHPST2016Europe
Follow @LiamDGuilfoyle, @EPISTEM_UL, and @EPS_UL