Early Childhood Teachers' Self-efficacy Toward Teaching Science: Outcomes of Professional Development
Abstract
The teaching of science in the early childhood classrooms has slowly been decreasing. As the years have passed, the subject of science has been put on the backburner while mathematics and language arts have taken center stage in the educational system. Early childhood teachers need to find ways to integrate science with other subjects in order to ensure children are receiving a well-rounded and full education. The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of professional development on teachers' efficacy in teaching science. Volunteer teachers completed the Weisgram and Bigler scale (TWBS) pre and post training, in order to determine their self-efficacy toward teaching science, they also completed pre- and post- concept maps about their knowledge of teaching science, and a demographic questionnaire.Findings indicate the training provided was effective in increasing teachers' knowledge of teaching science. Teachers who had an increase in science teaching knowledge were also found to feel more efficacious about teaching science after completing the training and an academic year of implementing science lessons in their classrooms. There was not a relationship between teacher demographics and their science-teaching efficacy. This means that the demographics of participants in this study were not influential on teachers' efficacy, but professional development workshops enabled teachers to gain more knowledge about teaching as well as increase their efficacy about teaching science.
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