Preparing Cypriot teachers for cognitive coaching : the case of physics and other sciences

Abstract

It is generally accepted that science education is in serious difficulty on a global scale. In Cyprus, between the eighth and twelfth grades, the number of students who are able to keep up with curriculum objectives drops by more than 50%. When achievement is compared, Cypriot students perform significantly below the international average at all grade levels (TIMSS, 1997). Internationally, performance measures repeatedly demonstrate disappointingly low achievement in tasks that require fundamental understanding, systematic reasoning or creative thinking. There are surely many aspects of our educational systems that contribute to this problem. They include the lack of adequate support for our teachers, the complex expectations from a single profession that translate into unrealistic expectations from individual teachers and the excessive standards that are routinely specified by our societies. All these aspects contribute to a global culture of largely ignoring the essential aims of science education in favor of finding ways to bypass the learning process at all levels of the educational system. Another such aspect that is commonly ignored is the failure of the scientific community that is concerned with education to formulate established terminology and procedures that it can then use as a basis for making progress. The cultural tendency of this community to be more political than technical (falsely justified as being in the interest of political correctness and humanitarian ethos) has tended to make it prone to continual re-invention of past practices and new fads. It has also largely prevented it from gradually weaving scientific expertise with widely recognized and respected applicability. This chapter focuses on one facet of the current crisis: the failure of our universities to provide the type of preparation that pre-college teachers need to teach science effectively. The discussion is in terms of physics, but the situation in other sciences is similar.