High School Physical Sciences Teachers’ Competence in Some Basic Cognitive Skills
Abstract
The successful implementation of the national high school Physical Sciences curriculum in South Africa, which places strong emphasis on critical thinking and reasoning abilities of students, would need teachers who are competent in cognitive skills and strategies. The main objectives of this study were to test South African high school Physical Sciences teachers’ competence in the cognitive skills and strategies needed for studying Physical Sciences effectively and also to identify possible reasons for their difficulties and suggest methods for overcoming them. The study method used was the analysis of teachers’ answers to questions that were carefully designed to test competence in explanation skills, mathematical skills, graphical skills, three-dimensional visualization skills, information-processing skills and reasoning skills. Seventy-three teachers from about 50 Dinaledi schools in the North West and Kwazulu-Natal provinces were tested. Teachers’ competence was found to be poor in most of the skills tested. About 40 % (average performance in all 14 test questions) of them had difficulty in answering the questions. Teachers’ lack of competence in cognitive skills and strategies would be an important limiting factor in the successful implementation of the Physical Sciences curriculum. An urgent need therefore exists for training teachers to increase their competence in the cognitive skills and strategies that are needed for studying science effectively.
Keywords: Cognitive skills, thinking skills, questions testing skills, problem solving, teacher training, high school physical science
Copyright for articles published in this journal is retained by the journal.
SAJChem applies the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license to manuscripts we publish. This license was developed to facilitate open access – namely, free immediate access to, and unrestricted reuse of, original works of all types. Under this license, authors agree to make articles legally available for reuse, without permission or fees, for virtually any purpose. Anyone may copy, distribute or reuse these articles, as long as the author and original source are properly cited.