{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03788094559954429, 'fraction_numerical': 0.013101680432925093, 'mean_word_length': 5.385454545454546, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 1, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Inquiry in the Kindergarten Science: Helping Kindergarten Teachers to Implement Inquiry-Based Teaching

Twenty kindergarten in-service teachers participated in a 25hr professional development program (PDP) supporting the development of abilities for identifying and responding to students’ in-class inquiry. Each teacher taught a science lesson at the beginning and at the end of the PDP. These were videotaped and analyzed in terms of the student inquiry the teachers responded to. Findings suggest that average student talk duration increased and students’ leads were increasingly used to guide lesson flow. Teachers increased responses to students’ reasoning and logic, offered more clarifications to students’ ideas and reasoning, and decreased evaluations of students’ ideas. However, teacher responses to knowledge claims increased and those to everyday experiences decreased. Theoretical Framework Scientific literacy includes more than just understanding the concepts of science. Current science education reform efforts, both in Europe and USA, emphasize promoting inquiry in science education (EC, 2007; NRC, 2007). Several studies (e.g., Boulter & Gilbert, 1996; Chin, 2006; Louca, Tzialli & Zacharia, in press), have emphasized the teacher’s role in promoting inquiry in the classroom when considering that inquiry-based teaching involves a complex process of adjusting teacher questioning based on the evaluation of the classroom discourse (e.g., van Zee & Minstrell, 1997). The ability to adapt instruction during teaching requires that teachers are able to notice and respond to aspects of classroom-based student inquiry (van Es & Sherin, 2002). To do so, teachers need to be able to listen to their students (van Zee & Minstrell, 1997), indentify elements of inquiry, and decide how best to proceed based on an evaluation of what they have identified (Louca, Tzialli & Zacharia, in press). We refer to these abilities as “teacher noticing and responding” (TNR). By “noticing” we refer to teachers’ abilities to attend to and reason about student inquiry as this takes place during instruction. “Responding” refers to teachers’ abilities to evaluate specific classroom exchanges and decide which teaching strategy is most appropriate for supporting each case of student inquiry (van Zee & Minstrel, 1997; Louca, Tzialli & Zacharia, in press). Developing TNR abilities depends largely on teachers' initial preparation and subsequent professional development in teaching science, although, TNR abilities have not traditionally been part of teacher preparation programs for science teaching (e.g., Fleer & Hardy, 2001; Freese, 2006). To address this need we developed a professional development program (PDP) aiming to help kindergarten teachers develop a range of teaching strategies to support students’ scientific inquiry. Our PDP had three distinctive parts. The first part introduced teachers to the aspects of scientific inquiry and inquiry-based teaching and learning in kindergarten science education. The second part focused on helping teachers develop and implement inquiry-based lesson plans in kindergarten science. The third part involved reflecting on video clips of each others’ lessons illustrating student inquiry and teachers’ responses. More information about our PDP can be found at http://prescience.co.uk/s-team/course/view.php?id=37. Our purpose in this paper was to investigate the possible impact of the PDP on the teaching of 20 in-service kindergarten teachers in Cyprus.