Pedagogy is arguably a contested term, encompassing classroom practices, the theories that underpin practice and wider contexts of school cultures and society beyond schools. This thesis focuses on effective teaching practices specifically in secondary school physics with this wider picture in mind. An exploration of the general literature on effective pedagogy was a necessary step towards understanding how this resonates with research specifically concerning secondary school physics teaching. From the general literature, techniques such as regular low-stakes feedback, pupil active participation, lesson objectives, meta-cognition and scaffolding emerged as particularly important. Pupils’ prior conceptions about scientific ideas and the use of practical laboratory work are also important themes within science pedagogy. It is also recognised that features of effective practice are often linked to constructivism and social constructivism, and teaching practices are often evaluated through measurements of pupils’ progress. This project subsequently adopted a systematic approach to identify relevant peerreviewed papers concerning effective secondary physics teaching in the United Kingdom (UK), published between 2010 and 2021. This systematic search of education databases identified five such peer-reviewed papers, spanning quantitative and qualitative research. The papers were assessed for quality, and two papers were rated as moderately high quality with the rest seen to be of moderate quality. A narrative approach was then taken to develop a description of effective secondary physics teaching in the UK, by looking for consonances and differences among these fives paper and triangulation with the wider literature. Constructivist and social constructivist theories were again seen as important in these five papers, even if only implicitly. From this narrative synthesis, a picture emerges of physics teaching that values dialogue and discussion, engages with research on pupils’ prior conceptions and in which teachers are equipped with good subject knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge and a repertoire of techniques, explanations and analogies. However, the identification of only five papers (two of which reported different aspects of the same trial and only two of which were of higher quality) could perhaps indicate a paucity of reported research into effective secondary physics teaching in the UK in the past decade. Therefore, there is scope for further empirical research in this area.
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Hack, Christopher Ethan
Rights Holders: Hack, Christopher Ethan Supervisors: Frodsham, Sarah
School of Education
MA Education
2021
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