Saudi Science Preservice Teachers' Attitude Toward Teaching Practices in Sciences

The purpose of this work was to investigate the attitudes of Saudi secondary preservice science teachers (SPSTs) toward science teaching practices. The essential goal was to use generated findings to improve the current secondary science education programs in Saudi Arabia and to develop better science teacher practices. The selected practices were posted by the National Research Council in 1999. These indicated that students learn science best through understanding of science rather than memorization of scientific facts and concepts, building new knowledge and understanding on what is already known and believed, formulating new knowledge by modifying and refining current concepts and by adding new concepts to what is already known, taking care of their own learning, social learning environments and interactions, and application of knowledge to novel situations. This work was based on SPSTs in four teachers' colleges located in cities: Riyadh, Makkah, Taif, & Dammam. SPSTs were asked to complete a 58-item questionnaire survey and respond to four open-ended survey questions. Data was analyzed by the Rasch analysis model, parametric & non-parametric tests.