Addressing preservice teacher’s disjunctive knowledge and corresponding beliefs regarding guided-discovery based pedagogical practices

This study assesses pre-service teachers’ understanding of Piagetian theory, how these teachers-in-training would implement and execute discovery-based and guided-discovery based lessons, as well as their preferred pedagogical practices, before and after having participated in both didactic and an immersive guided-discovery based lesson. Within both, linkages between theory and practice were explicitly made in reference to disequilibration, assimilation, accommodation, schema development, re-equilibration, and related topics. Results indicate that by the end of the course, pre-service teachers’ were reliably able to discern whether a task was more assimilative versus accommodative; they also demonstrated accuracy in their conceptions of what constituted disequilibrating events. Students’ descriptions of how they would “facilitate” their students’ active construction of knowledge however, revealed several misconceptions and a superficial understanding of how these theories intersect with practice. Additional data that were culled pertaining to students’ theories about science teaching revealed a marked stability in beliefs regarding preferred pedagogical practices. Discussion, implications, and suggested future research are provided so this immersive experience can be replicated, and augmented by concept teaching, to foster positive outcomes for pre-service instructors and the students they will serve.