INTEGRATING VISUALIZATIONS IN SCIENCE TEACHING: TEACHERS’ DIFFICULTIES AND PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES

This study is a qualitative research where it tries to finding out and analyze the teacher's pedagogical approaches and difficulties to introduce visualizations in science classroom. The use of visualizations in classroom has increased substantially, especially since the development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Fourteen in-service teachers were investigated across a teachers' training course to seek their difficulties and pedagogical approaches for integrating these tools in teaching and learning sequences (TLS). During the training teachers were invited to build in group (five groups) teaching learning sequences about some science content using visualizations. The methodology is qualitative and a case study design was adopted. It was analysed the TLS made by them and the audiovisual record of their oral communications to the class. It was also analyzed the final semi-structured interview with these teachers' groups and a final report about the TLS application in classroom. These teachers present mainly pedagogical difficulties in order to select the suitable resource and to realize the full potentialities of these resources and sometimes the role of the teacher towards students and resources in the classroom. The technical barriers were the lack of school computers and appropriated software. The results suggest that these teachers are using mostly constructivist approaches to incorporate the visualizations in classroom trying to take advantage of the interactivity that some of these tools allow. Two groups fall more in transmission view, using this resources mostly to present information and the rest tried to use this resources to build inquiry tasks. They chose above of all multimedia tools to enhance particular concepts and skills and sometimes to innovate presentations. Some difficulties related to pedagogical approaches and technical barriers to use these resources are discussed.