The teacher’ representations about the scientific inquiry approach a main factor to implement this approach at school

Abstract

This study aims to explore the teachers' representations relating to the scientific inquiry approach and its application at school, and to identify possible dependency relationships between these representations and the independent variables which are the teacher’ gender, his preservice education institution, his professional experience and the teaching level. The researcher adopted the questionnaire survey that she designed and applied on a sample of 265 teachers of physics and technology at middle and secondary school; the participants were chosen randomly.  After data collection, the researcher used the descriptive analysis with the statistical package SPSS 23. Findings showed that a large part of teachers has representations that do not meet the inquiry-based learning definition and its characteristics. Teachers believe that the teaching-centered method and the inductive approach are the most appropriate for teaching physics. Only a minority has representations that are adequate to the principles of the scientific investigation process and has favourable posture for its application at school. The multiple correspondence analysis ACM showed a dependency relationship between the teacher' representations, his preservice education institution and his professional experience. Teachers with a high professional experience tend to develop an adequate representation and a favourable posture toward this approach due to the professional socialization and the self-training. The minority of teachers favouring this approach is mostly constituted by those coming from the high schools of teachers.