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Thinking Outside the Kit: Building Preservice Science Teachers’ Inquiry Skills With an Experiment That Doesn’t Go as Planned

Journal of College Science Teaching—September/October 2010

Preservice preparation courses for elementary teachers of science can provide opportunities to build pedagogical content knowledge. One common concern of preservice teachers is how to cope with a preplanned lesson that does not proceed as planned. Providing opportunities for preservice teachers to experience the unexpected actually immerses them in creative problem solving that is a hallmark of scientific investigation. This lesson in a preservice science methods course requires future teachers to build problem-solving skills through scientific inquiry as they cope with a type of science-kit activity in which the experiment does not go as planned.
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