All rights reserved. UP NISMED 1997-2008
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MONOGRAPHS
This monograph aims to present a broad view of various aspects of science education in the Philippines and provide data showing how the country compares with other Asian countries. Divided into two parts: the first part deals mainly with the organization and structure of science education at the primary and secondary levels of education. Reference to the tertiary levels pertains to the pre-service education of science and mathematics teachers. the second part deals with the qualitative aspects of science education with reference to Philippine situation which require further study.
This is a result of a case study which lent itself to self directed learning, an important strategy for a life long education. The concept of self-directed learning was operationlized which includes: horizontal integration (integration across school subjects, activities, and agencies having educational functions), vertical integration (articulation among curriculum components at different levels of schooling), self-directed learning strategies (individualization learning experiences directed towards enhancing the learner's skill in planning, executing and evaluating learning activities), and democratization (sharing decision making in the learning-teaching process, human exercise of authority and the encouragement of creativity, divergent thinking, flexibility).
What do children know about the concepts of health and environment? Monograph 19 describes the rationale, methodology and findings of two case studies dealing with children's concepts conducted in a fishing and an agricultural communities. The case studies demonstrate a methodology which teachers can use in their own classrooms to secure information that could provide cues on what children know about a given concept which can in turn form the basis for preparing teaching plans or preparing learning episodes or materials.
This research study was designed to find answers to the following:
1. What is the concept of health of Filipino
adolescents?
Using the methodology on concept formation designed by Schaefer, two groups of selected high school students from an urban environment responded to an open-ended format of questioning. The responses were categorized based on the associations and definitions of the keyword "health". The findings derived from this research may serve as bases for the selection of ways for improving biology teaching.
A survey conducted in six provinces to identify the interest of children as revealed by the questions they ask about themselves and their environment. The study also attempts to answer the following questions:
1. Do children in grades 2, 4 and 6 ask
questions that differ in terms of number and kind?
An abaca-growing community and a coconut-growing community were studied to find out their resource needs, economic activities, etc. The data gathered from these studies, and from the studies of fishing and agricultural communities done by other workgroups formed the basis for determining possible topics of ESS modules. The resulting socioeconomic profiles of the two communities as well as the list of topics subsequently drawn up, are presented in this monograph.
This paper addresses itself to teachers of elementary school mathematics. It dwells on the theme that while mathematics is abstract, the content of elementary school mathematics should be abstracted from concrete considerations; corollarily then, since elementary school teachers invariably teach as they are taught, the methodology of mathematics content courses for elementary teachers should also proceed from concrete considerations. Examples are discussed to bring home these points.
This monograph presents an evaluation of the readability level of the Elementary School Science Series developed by the Science Education Center under the National Textbook Project of EDPITAF. Implications of the finding of the study to the use of the ESS series and recommendations on how to use Fry's readability graph and Cloze procedure in determining readability level are given.
This paper shows how survey results may be utilized in the assessment of educational programs and in the planning of future programs of a similar nature. The data used in this particular study came from surveys of teachers' and students' achievement as well as from responses of teachers to a questionnaire, all three of which were administered in 1981. Analyses of the data provide answers to the following questions:
1. Have educational interventions
in experimental school significantly raised achievement?
This paper was presented at the 9th AABE Conference in Melbourne, Australia in December 1982. It responds in a comprehensive but very practical manner to a question that may be raised by some teachers: "What can (we) do to contribute to (the effort of achieving 'health for all by the year 2000')?". The child situation in the country is given with emphasis on nutrition and the leading causes of child mortality and morbidity. Science textbooks and the scope and sequence of the physics education and home economics courses are examined and analyzed to find out the biology-related topics. Curriculum maps, detailing topics in biology and health that can be taught together, activities suggested for each topic, and the skills/attitudes which may be learned/derived from a particular topic, are likewise presented.
As the title suggests, this study documents young people's views on dating, going steady, premarital relations, marriage and marital life, birth control and zero population growth. How they would respond to specific situations involving the opposite sex is likewise reported. Students in two Natural Science III classes comprised the sample. Their opinions and behavior, which are assumed to be reflective of their values and attitudes, provide a general picture of the outlook of today's youth.
This paper is a research report on the effects of acculturation and social class on cognition and scientific thinking of Filipino adolescents. Analysis of the data provide answers for the two questions: Do poor, rural children suffer from a cognitive deficit or a cognitive difference? If it is a cognitive difference, what cognitive skills are developed among rural adolescents? And finally, the paper discussed the educational implications of the differences in cognitive skills to Philippine teaching and learning situations.
This monograph is a follow-up of a case study first reported in October 1981 on ISMED Monograph Monograph No. 19 as "Case Study 1: The Concept of Health and Environment Among Children of a Fishing Community". The aim of this second investigation was to find if there would be differences in the responses of students of the same age group to the same tests administered a year ago in the same elementary school. The association tests were concerned with the concepts of health and environment taking into consideration the factors of language, age and sex.
This monograph reports the findings of the analysis for the level of cognitive demand of the High School Science 1 Textbook "Exploring Our Environment". Four features of the book were analyzed: the activities, the reading passages, the self-evaluation items, and the additional investigations. An important question addressed by the study is: Does the book's level of cognitive demand match the level of cognitive development of the intended users?
Secondary students' explanations to familiar instances/events were gathered through clinical interviews. An analysis of the transcripts revealed that the kinetic theory is very little used by the students to explain movement of particles. A survey of 1,401 students yield the same results. It seems that students find it difficult to interpret motion of particles as intrinsic. The study discuss some epistemological considerations and gives some suggestions in teaching the topic.
It is assumed that educational personnel be they teachers or supervisors need updating in subject matter and some teaching methodology. Data collected from 116 science and mathematics supervisors from the 13 regions of the country are useful to teacher educators who plan and conduct in-service programs for supervisors.
This report presents the results of a survey on the understanding of concepts in six topics - fractions, ratio, measurement graphs, integers and algebra - by about two thousand high school students. For each subtest an analysis of student performance and implications for teaching are presented.
This paper compares policies and programmes on computers in science and mathematics education at the primary, secondary and teacher education levels in Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. The emphasis is on learning with and about computers. Areas of regional cooperation are proposed for consideration of ASEAN education planners.
This study is an assessment of university students' notions of force and energy, particularly, force of gravity and conservation of mechanical energy. The instruments used are of the association and multiple choice types with some items requiring students' explanation. The results are compared with earlier similar studies at the secondary and elementary levels.
This monograph presents the summative evaluation of Physics in Your Environment, a study conducted by the Physics Group of University of the Philippines, Institute for Science and Mathematics Education Development. The summative evaluation of the book was based on the nationwide feedback from science supervisors and teachers; classroom observation of selected physics classes in Metro Manila, Bulacan and Cavite; responses of the teachers and students who used the book; and the physics achievement tests. The report also includes the content and readability analyses of the book.
This paper presents the methodology and results of an experimental study funded by the Philippine National Science Society and conducted in 1988-1989 by the Physics Workgroup, Institute for Science and Mathematics Education Development, University of the Philippines. The study focused on an approach that uses community resources and addresses community problems in teaching physics. The research evaluated the effect of this community-oriented approach or the learn-and-serve approach primarily on student achievement in physics and students' attitude towards physics.
In 1993 alone, 2145 children were directly and indirectly affected by militarization (Children's Rehabilitation Center data) in different Philippine regions, the highest five of which were Cagayan Valley, Bicol, and Central Eastern and Western Visayas. Children In War: Implications for Publication Education is an integration of local and foreign literature to develop a framework for the rehabilitation of Filipino children.
This ministudy was conducted among private and public school teachers to determine what practices relating to thinking skills they include in classroom teaching. Specifically, it aimed to find out the following: Do teachers stress other objectives of teaching besides subject matter knowledge? What kind of problem solving or thinking skills do they utilize in day-to-day teaching?
This study reports the views of thinking of rural third year secondary students regarding five chemistry concepts/principles before and after taking these concepts/principles in class. The chemistry concepts are energy conservation, heat exchange, chemical reaction, factors affecting chemical change, and effective fire control.
This monograph was prepared to reach primarily the secondary school teachers who teach science in Philippine schools that have no access to libraries or professional books that could enhance their background knowledge about science, its nature and history.
This study addresses students' construction of meanings in electromagnetism. It is a case study in naturalistic constructivist-based instruction of four months' duration with a sample of 30 fourth-year high school students from three different government schools in Central Luzon and Metro Manila. Constructivist-based teaching sequences involving metacognition were used in classroom teaching. Data gathering techniques used were classroom observation, interview, and questionnaires. Patterns of prior knowledge and new knowledge and conceptual change were generated using phenomenographic analysis of students' chains of concepts during the learning process. The topics selected for investigation were electric current in open/closed circuits, models of current, electric current and voltage in series and parallel circuits, magnetic field between north poles of two bar magnets, and electromagnetic induction.
This is a case study of conceptual change teaching to find out the influence of cooperative learning on students' understanding of some selected concepts in high school chemistry. It was done in actual classroom settings of four-month duration with a sample of thirty third year students from two intact classes of a science high school, taught by the same chemistry teacher. It examined the nature of the conceptual changes that took place and attempted to identify the emerging conditions that seemed to encourage or hinder the process of conceptual change. Data gathering techniques used were classroom observation, written and oral interviews and questionnaires. The topics selected for investigation were concepts related to structure of matter and chemical bonding. Phenomenographic analysis of the students' answers in the explanation portion of the pretest and posttest generated a set of categories of description for each concept. Conceptual trace analysis provided a classification of each of the students' responses to the multiple-choice questions. From the conceptual trace analysis results, it was possible to determine exactly what changes occurred from the pretest to the posttest.
This monograph is a collection of three papers read by the author at different fora. The first paper points out that reforms in science teacher education like conducting various inservice trainings, are not so effective if the socio-economic environment of teachers is not supportive of quality science education. The second paper focuses on what research says about the effectiveness of using computers as teaching aids. Other issues related to the use of computers in the school are discussed like teachers' fear of being replaced. The third paper examines some Information Technology options in teaching, research and extension for the University of the Philippines for the 21st century.
This study determined the different patterns exhibited by twenty third-year high school students in classifying 27 organisms. Their written answers to a standardized, open-ended questionnaire and audiotaped self-reports on how they performed the skill constituted the raw data. This was complemented by the researcher's observations and the subjects' answers to clarificatory questions in the course of one-on-one interviews. Six different patterns in classifying emerged from the data, defending on the goal of the subject. Each pattern is described, characterized and analyzed in terms of its constituent skills, accompanying behaviors, possible relationship to ability groupings and interaction with content. Recommendations include specific suggestions for the deliberate teaching of thinking skills in the classroom.
This study is about teacher's beliefs regarding their tasks/roles. It includes an inventory of actual site-specific duties of Science and Mathematics teachers across their life span, how these actual tasks vary over time as they stay longer in the profession and how these teachers rank the importance of these tasks prescribed to them in the Civil Service Job Description. Science and Mathematics teachers all over the country who participated at UPISMED's training programs between April and July 1997 were the respondents of the study. They were given a ten-item Duties of the Teacher Questionnaire, a validated instrument adapted from a previous study on teacher's duties. Teacher duties were classified as generic duty, domain-specific duties and site-specific duties. Information of generic domain-specific and site-specific duties of novice, mid-career and exiting teachers were gathered. The result of the study has implications to teacher training specially in the areas of teacher professional development, teaching practices and research.
This study investigated secondary school students' conceptions of force and motion and the effectiveness of the microcomputer-based laboratory (MBL) and the constructivist strategy (CS) on the students' understanding of force and motion concepts. Using a quasi-experimental nonequivalent control group design, four treatments: the combination of MBL and CS, the combination of MBL and the traditional strategy (TS), the combination of traditional laboratory (TL) and CS, and the traditional approach (control) were tried out in two schools, a public school and a private school, in a three-month period during the school year 1993-1994.
The monograph highlights how ethnomathematics which are forms of mathematics that changes as a result of being integrated in cultural activities, may be used to enhance student's learning. It suggests ways by which ethnomathematics can address 3 of the reasons for the dismal performance of Filipino students in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study. These reasons are the mathematically imprecise Filipino Language, inadequate mathematical preparetion of would-be mathematics teachers, and the mismatch of the cognitive demand of schoolwork and students cognitive level. Among others it cites weaving as an example to show how to teach mathematical concepts like geometric transformation.
Update: 04/04/2008 |
