Teachers’ beliefs about subject specific competences and inquiry based learning

Abstract

The Austrian Ministry of Education has set up several measures as reaction to the low results in international student assessment studies like TIMSS or PISA: On the level of systematic monitoring, one strategy was to implement educational subject specific standards to change the focus of the educational system from input to output orientation. Subject specific standards and standardization has become one main issue in Austrian education in the last decade. There are several reasons why teachers encounter the issue of standards with resentments. One is that teachers were not provided with sufficient supportive measures in time, like teacher training courses or teaching materials, for a paradigmatic change in their teaching culture. Due to this shortfall, a number of beliefs and misconceptions about competence oriented teaching have spread. There seems to be a high tendency among teachers to interpret competence orientation only in terms of implementing open learning strategies which do not require guidance by the teachers at all. In the field of science teaching this idea of open, unguided learning manifests in the increase of Inquiry Based Learning (IBL), which of course can only be one way of promoting competence orientation. However, our work with teachers suggests that IBL is frequently just perceived as doing experimental work without any interference by the teacher. This situation served as the starting point for a research project which investigates teachers’ beliefs about competence orientation and IBL. As sample we chose teachers who applied for a continuous professional development programme (CMSE) focusing on the promotion of students’ subject specific competences. Our results show that even this preselected sample, which is about to take the challenge of competence orientation, struggles with competence orientation and the introduction of IBL.