Brent Kamba and Dr. Jennifer Nielson, Chemistry
There is a great need for students to learn scientific skills in Uganda. Very few students pass the national chemistry exams (about 40%) and even fewer go on to study science fields in higher education. The teaching methods in Uganda are a little bit old fashion where students often just learn facts and practise rote memorization. Rarely do they develop the critical and analytical skills to help them succeed in science jobs. Teachers also express that the curriculum is very theoretical, and not experimental.
The purpose of this workshop project was to teach secondary school science teachers in Uganda to incorporate simple chemistry demonstrations in class and student labs in order to help students learn chemical concepts and develop critical thinking and analytical skills. These workshops were also research experiments in chemical education, using a randomized control trial design to determine their effectiveness. There is a need for more information on the effectiveness of science teaching workshops. We successfully facilitated the first of these inservice workshops for 60 secondary school science teachers summer 2013 in Uganda. We prepared for these workshops by designing simple, inexpensive, water based experiments that can be performed relatively easy in Uganda because their resources are limited. Although the the experiments are simple, they all can be use the teach valuable chemistry concepts in a practical way. We have collaborated with Uganda’s top universities, Makarere University and Kyambogo University. We have had also had a lot of help from other Ugandan organizations to organize and prepare the workshops. Our workshops come at a critical time as the government is in the process of updating their science curriculums. The new curriculum focuses on teaching students by experimentation.
The workshops were designed according to the latest research on best practices for educational professional development. The teachers reviewed concepts, and then practised every experiment at least 3 times and recorded the procedure in their lab books. They were also given time to modify their experiments according to their needs and the resources they would have in their classrooms. At the end of each workshop, teachers were given time to work on an implementation plan, but they were randomly assigned into two different groups. The teachers in the control group were given a structured plan based on best practices from education literature. The treatment group were not given an implementation plan, but had to create their own. They were introduced to the same best practices and the control group, but they chose and modified them to fit their situation. We have followed the teachers through this last school year to assess whether they successfully incorporated experiments into their classrooms and labs. The data will be used to modify and improve this years workshops in August 2014. We invited the most successful teachers from last years workshops to help teach this years. This will allow the workshops to be self-sustainable and the Ugandan teachers will mentor each other.
Our hypothesis was that teachers teachers who wrote their own plan were more likely to implement it. Results showed that 80% of the treatment group finished their plan compared to 28% of the control group. We also observed that both groups of teachers changed their teaching practices and incorporated more experiments in their teaching. The control group had a 45% increase in the number of experiments and the treatment group had a 70% increase. Many teachers reported that their students performed better on exams and that there was an increase of interest in chemistry amongst their students.
Only about a third of the teachers did report back so the data we have collected is not as significant as we would like it to be. However, the numbers that we have are very encouraging and we are looking to build on them as we go back this summer. One of the major difficulties that is faced by teachers in Uganda is that they don’t have access to good technology which made it very difficult to follow through the year. We will continue to collect data to make our results statistically significant.
Overall we feel that the workshops were very successful and the Ugandan teachers were very receptive. All of them expressed that the workshops would benefit their teaching practices. We have been invited to return and teach preservice teachers who are students who are at the universities that are training to be science teachers. We hope to collect more results from this experiment and make these workshops sustainable.