Understanding how pre-service science teachers design inquiry-based activities in a knowledge integration (KI) based collaborative learning environment: a network analytic approach

Inquiry-based instruction has played an important role in science education, and been recognized as a critical approach to improve students’ scientific learning effectiveness. However, current research revealed that it is a challenge for teacher education programs to improve pre-service science teachers’ inquiry-based instructional activity design competency. Due to the dynamic and complicated process of the instructional design competency improvement, there is a strong need for new methods that could trace this process. Considering the Knowledge Integration (KI) theory has been demonstrated to be able to help science teachers design their inquiry-based instructional activities in a large amount of existing research, in this study, a KI-based collaborative learning environment was designed to support 19 pre-service science teachers’ inquiry-based instructional activity design. Epistemic network analysis (ENA) was applied to trace the development process of their inquiry-based instructional activity design e behaviour patterns. Data analysis results revealed that the pre-service science teachers demonstrated gradually more active in “guiding students to design exploratory activities” and “guiding students to communicate and cooperate” in their instructional designs during the process of using the KI-based collaborative learning environment. Through identifying and comparing the design patterns of the high-performing and low-performing groups, the results showed that the low-performing groups demonstrated more active on “posing inquiry questions” and “guiding students to formulate scientific explanation,” while the high performing groups demonstrated more active in “guiding students to design exploratory activities” and “guiding students to communicate and cooperate.” Furthermore, the semi-structured interview results demonstrated that the KI-based collaborative learning environment not only provided the pre-service science teachers a convenient way on online collaboration, but also helped them form more normative and integrated understandings on inquiry-based instruction. However, this study demonstrated that quite a few pre-service science teachers still had misconceptions on inquiry-based instruction. Suggestions are provided for improving pre-service science teachers’ inquiry-based instructional design competency in a technology-enhanced learning environment.