Main orientations of science education research and research types : a critical analysis of the most influential papers (1993-2002)

Abstract

In the last few years, there has been a trend inside the Science Education Research (SER) community to analyze the “health” of SER (e.g. Fensham, 2004; Gilbert, 1995; Horton et al. 1993; Jenkins, 2000; Millar & Osborne, 1998). Our aim is to explicit the relationship between the main orientations of science education research (for practice or theory) with research type (categories defined by Tsai & Wen, 2005, e.g. empirical, theoretical, position papers and revision research). The corpus of the selected papers was formed by the most influential SER papers in the period between1993-2002. Two main criteria were used to select the papers: i) Papers published in three of the most important international SER journals (SE - Science Education, JRST - Journal of Research in Science Teaching and IJSE - International Journal of Science Education); ii) Papers of a restricted group of “more times cited” in each year. We identified the 152 most influential papers: 43 from SE; 73 from JRST; and 36 from IJSE. Our analysis show that the empiric research type prevails among all main orientations of SER (for practice, for theory or for policy). Only a small group of studies is concern to find and make explicit the reference points of Science Education field. This work may contribute to transpose the fragmentation obstacle of present SE knowledge. A good start point would be characterize what we know about SE and identify the persistent problems and the new problems