Building confidence in scientific inquiry skills with pre-service primary school teachers

Scientific understanding and literacy are critical skills for students to develop in primary school. However, primary school teachers often receive minimal training in science as a part of their initial teacher education. Therefore, many lack the confidence to incorporate open ended scientific inquiry into their teaching practice. We conducted an intervention with Master of Teaching (primary) preservice teachers to provide an authentic, formative scientific inquiry experience in advance of preparing their assessment. Briefly, the preservice teachers designed and conducted an experiment where they changed the environmental conditions for a marshmallow. To establish the effectiveness of the intervention, a paired pre-post survey was developed. The pre-survey identified considerable variation in both their prior knowledge and experiences of science, and indicated that the majority of the preservice teachers lacked confidence in their science skills and had concerns about incorporating scientific inquiry into their teaching practice. Following the intervention, preservice teachers reported feeling more confident (4 on a 5 point Likert scale) about science and their ability to incorporate scientific inquiry into their teaching practice. Our results demonstrate the impact of timely, curriculum aligned interventions and suggest that there is a substantial value in providing hands-on authentic inquiry experiences in preservice teacher training.