Duality between the discourse and practice of a secondary school chemistry teacher: a case study involving a structured inquiry
Karine Molvinger
Institut Charles Gerhardt Montpellier, Univ Montpellier, CNRS, ENSCM, Montpellier, France. E-mail: karine.molvinger-verger@umontpellier.fr
First published on 17th July 2025
Abstract
In recent years, science teaching has mostly taken the form of inquiry. Thus, learners are more involved in the construction of their knowledge and skills, as these activities imply a constructivist approach. Although this method has shown certain advantages over traditional methods, it poses implementation difficulties for teachers. Moreover, different levels of guidance can be proposed, ranging from very closed inquiries, close to classic practical work, to more open-ended situations. In this paper, we are interested in the implementation of an inquiry by a secondary school chemistry teacher (year 10). We attempt to cross-reference qualitative data (observation of his classroom inquiry) with quantitative data collected from a questionnaire on his teaching. Is what the teacher does in the classroom consistent with what he says about his practice? How does he implement inquiry in his classroom session? We use the theoretical frameworks of PCK and the theory of joint action in didactics to try to answer our questions. This inquiry focuses on ion recognition tests conducted as a police investigation. This study shows that there is an inconsistency between what he implements in the classroom and his discourse on science teaching.
Introduction
Context of research
Over the past several decades, inquiry-based activities (hands on) have been making their appearance in secondary school chemistry classes. These approaches lead to better understandings of certain concepts in chemistry as well as critical thinking skills. For example, Hale-Hanes (2015) points to the benefits of these activities for the notions of acid and base, and Carraher et al. (2016) for kinetics in relation to reaction mechanisms and industrial processes. Duangpummet et al. (2019) show that these activities promote green chemistry through the use of catalysts. Tatsuoka et al. (2015) also show greater student motivation for this teaching. These activities have an impact on students, who are more effective (notion of self-efficacy and self-regulation) (Vishnumolakala et al., 2017, Kadioglu-Akbulut and Uzuntiryaki-Kondakci, 2021). When it comes to chemistry teachers, some try to use inquiry methods (Cheung, 2011), but many don't, thinking that students will not appreciate them (Chatterjee et al., 2009; Hofer et al., 2018). Many novice teachers, even the most highly qualified, refrain from implementing it in the classroom (Roehrig and Luft, 2004). Problems with the cost of chemistry materials and the time-consuming nature of these sessions also do not encourage teachers to mobilize them in the classroom (Boesdorfer and Livermore, 2018).More generally, the idea is to have students in science classrooms conduct an “inquiry” so that they can provide answers to a question they ask themselves following a starting situation described by the teacher. This method of teaching science, based as often as possible on experimental activities, was introduced in the USA in the 1960s and was integrated into American programs in the 1990s (AAAS, 1993) under the name IBSE (Inquiry-based Science Education) or sometimes IBST (Inquiry-Based Science Teaching). The official text is the one published in the USA in 1996 by the National Research Council (1996), which describes the general principle of inquiry-based science teaching: “Inquiry into authentic questions generated from student experiences is the crucial strategy for teaching science”. This teaching method was instituted in particular to face the disaffection of young people for scientific and technical studies (Eurydice, 2006; Rocard et al., 2007) which could, in the longer term, be detrimental to the scientific, technological and economic development of the country. In France, this teaching method, called the “inquiry approach”, appeared in the experimental science and mathematics programs of French schools (primary and secondary) in the 2000s.
These activities involve teaching science in a constructivist manner by placing the student in the centre, in a situation similar to that of a scientist, with his or her trial and error and backtracking (Uno, 1990; Kuhn et al., 2000; French and Russell, 2002; Reid and Ali, 2020). Based on a problem situation, the students' representations are identified, scientific questions are asked and experiments carried out by the students allow them to answer them. The aim is to give a privileged place to the experiment. These scientific activities follow Bachelardian epistemology. Indeed, Gaston Bachelard's work (1938) on the formation of the scientific mind has replaced the empiricist, positivist and inductivist epistemologies of previous observation-based methods.
Although the inquiry approach emphasizes experience, other modes of investigation are possible, such as observation, documentary research, modelling, surveys and visits. Students examine a problem, try to answer a question by proposing hypotheses, explaining their point of view, discussing their classmates' hypotheses, arguing and setting up experiments whose analyses allow them to conclude and thus new knowledge and skills are acquired (Bell et al., 2010; Pedaste et al., 2015). One of the goals of the inquiry approach is to make science teaching more lively, more motivating for students. The tasks are more open-ended and lead to greater cognitive activity and consequently confer more autonomy on students than in courses where laws and theories are explained to them, they thus become actors in the construction of knowledge and skills (Driver and Oldham, 1986; Bednar et al., 1992; Von Glasersfeld, 1995; Bächtold, 2013). This approach was very quickly controversial, highlighting, among other things, the essentially playful nature of the approach and the lack of precision of the objectives in terms of knowledge (Kahn, 2000).
The definition of inquiry in the classroom is not stabilized. For example, for Howes et al. (2008), inquiry in the classroom is “what scientists do”. Among the many definitions of inquiry practice in the classroom, we retain that of Minner et al. (2009) “inquiry science instruction can be characterized as having three aspects: (1) the presence of science content, (2) student engagement with science content, and (3) student responsibility for learning, student active thinking, or student motivation within at least one component of instruction—question, design, data, conclusion, or communication.”
A great number of didactic researchers have focused on the study of the inquiry process, whether at the level of curricular analysis or at the level of analyses of practices (Park Rogers and Abell, 2008). Research on the inquiry approach has focused on the teaching and learning processes involved (Gengarelly and Abrams, 2009; Boilevin, 2013) and on the development of teachers' vision of science (Ledermann, 1999). Akkus et al. (2007) compare the effectiveness of an inquiry-based practice versus a traditional science teaching practice. Teacher observation as well as analysis of student post-instructional assessment results show that the quality of the implementation of the method has a significant impact on student outcomes. Furtak (2006) examines three teachers' approaches, which range from playful management in one teacher, to streamlined processing of responses in another, to accepting student responses without evaluating them. For her part, Crawford (2000) identifies different roles that a teacher must play in the context of inquiry activities in the classroom. Tang et al. (2010) highlight the tensions that arise in the classroom when teachers place too much emphasis on the steps of the scientific method at the expense of student-generated investigations.
The Real Science project developed by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts in Great Britain (NESTA, 2005) considers that scientific inquiry learning should enable students to formulate questions and hypotheses, to test and revise them, if necessary, based on experiments and observations, and to present their conclusions to others. This practice should lead students to understand the methods, results, and uses of science, even though these are not entirely the same activities as those of researchers. The overall idea is that this form of teaching develops an understanding of scientific practices and scientific knowledge. Ultimately, this should encourage students to pursue scientific studies.
Many benefits of this teaching method have been reported: students believe their critical thinking has increased as they solve problems, are more independent in their approach than in a traditional course (Baldock and Murphrey, 2020). Students seem to develop fewer misconceptions than with traditional methods (Barthlow and Watson, 2014). But many drawbacks have also been reported (Orosz et al., 2023) such as:
Lack of time: an inquiry session takes more time than a traditional session. It is necessary to take into account the hypotheses of each person, to set up experiments, to explain the results of each one, sometimes to redo the experiments, to argue…
Difficulties for the teacher: teachers do not have many resources at their disposal. They often have to invent situations (which must be attractive to the students so that they are interested in the problems), which is even more difficult for novice teachers who do not always have the pedagogical knowledge to do so. The classes are often large, which leads to more experiments that the teacher has to follow, in addition to safety issues. In addition, depending on the experiments that students propose, materials may be missing.
Assessment: during an inquiry session, it is difficult to evaluate students. Students may not be comfortable during such an exercise, which can affect their performance. Teachers should observe their students during the inquiry, noting their lab notebooks to see their entire process (Harlen, 2013).
It is therefore appropriate to study how teachers use this method in their practice. For Blanchard et al. (2009), one of the major obstacles to inquiry stems from the fact that few teachers have experience with scientific research. Inquiries can be more or less teacher-guided. Many researchers have proposed different levels for inquiry (Tafoya et al., 1980; Spronken-Smith and Walker, 2010; Zion and Mendelovici, 2012). Cheung (2007) proposes to categorize inquiry-based lab instruction according to student “ownership, control or responsibility”:
Confirmation lab: students have to follow a given protocol in order to verify a law or a theory. In this case the teacher is in charge of elaborating the scientific procedure, and the validity of the results are closely related to the proximity of the measures towards the expect theoretical values.
Structured inquiry: in this type of lab instruction, students have to answer a question without knowing the answer, but the procedure is given by the teacher.
Guided inquiry: students have to answer a question by conceiving the procedure. Also, Cheung includes in this category lab instructions in which students have to follow “a given experimental procedure to get a first understanding of new chemistry concepts”, we believe that they would better belong in the confirmation lab category as students do not have the responsibility of the experimental procedure neither of the validity of the results.
Open inquiry: this category of lab instruction differs from the guided inquiry by the fact that the question at stake is proposed by the students is an open question proposed by the teacher.
This categorization of lab instructions takes into account the responsibility of the students (from very low to being responsible for the questions and procedure), but it is also accounts for the type of knowledge that is at stake. For instance, in the first type of lab instruction, students develop essentially technical skills (for example doing a precise measurement with a burette). In an open inquiry, students can develop not only technical skills but also more conceptual knowledge. For example, when designing a protocol to prepare a given solution, the concept of molar concentration is at play. Consequently, teachers should choose what type of lab instruction to implement in class according to their learning goals.
In this paper, we are interested in teachers' knowledge from a didactic point of view. More specifically, we focus on the teaching of chemistry during structured inquiry activity. Indeed, the bibliographical study raises a number of difficulties in setting up an inquiry approach. In this case study, with the limitations that this imposes, we want to look at how a teacher conducts a session in chemistry when mobilizing this type of teaching. To do this, we observe the session. We also use a questionnaire to gather the teacher's opinions on the inquiry approach. The theoretical framework of PCK is mobilized in this study, and an articulation between qualitative and quantitative data is necessary from a methodological point of view. We will therefore focus on the duality between a teacher's discourse and practice.
Theoretical framework
For our study, we rely on two theoretical frameworks. We are interested in a particular type of knowledge, the PCKs (Pedagogical Content Knowledge) which allow us to characterize the content of this knowledge. Since we are interested in knowledge based on classroom practices, to characterize the action of teachers in class, we rely on the Joint Action Theory in Didactics (JATD).• The knowledge involved in teaching practices is not limited to subject matter content. Grossman (1990) defines four categories: general pedagogical knowledge, subject matter knowledge (SMK), content-related pedagogical knowledge (CRP) and school context knowledge. From a didactic point of view, we are mainly interested in content-related knowledge, which is why the PCK category is the one most used by didactic researchers. Shulman (1986) defines PCK as knowledge needed to teach – implying “to teach effectively”. He proposes a categorization. It is recognized that teachers' knowledge (its nature, quantity, articulation) plays a role in their practices and thus has a potential link to students' learning. Many models of PCK have been proposed (see for example Van Driel et al., 1998, Magnusson et al., 1999). In 2012, an initial summit of around twenty educational science researchers on PCKs highlighted some weaknesses in this model. Shulman himself identified five of them (Gess-Newsome, 2015):
– The absence of affect, emotion and motivation,
– An overemphasis on teacher thinking versus a teacher's skilled performance in the classroom,
– The omission of context,
– The omission of a teacher's vision and goals for education,
– The relationship of PCK to student outcomes.
A new PCK model was established, the Consensus Model (CM). A second summit was held in 2016 and led to the Refined Consensus Model (RCM) for the following reasons:
[…]to provide researchers with a means to situate studies of student science learning in relationship to PCK by focusing on teachers and classrooms. Another aim was to provide science teacher educators a means to situate theories about the development of teacher PCK through formal education, in-service professional learning, and first-hand teaching experiences (Carlson et al., 2019, p. 81).
The refined consensus model comprises three distinct realms (collective, personal and adopted) represented in the model by three main circles in three shades of blue: the specialized professional knowledge held by all teachers in a domain, the personalized professional knowledge held by a science teacher, and the knowledge a teacher uses in the preparation, execution and reflection of his or her teaching. A two-way exchange of knowledge takes place between the concentric circles of the model (Fig. 1). The different circles, from the center outwards, are described, bearing in mind that knowledge is exchanged between all these circles.
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| Fig. 1 Representation of the refined consensus model (RCM) of PCK (J. Carlson et al., 2019). | ||
As we mentioned at the end of the research context, we are examining whether there is a difference between what a teacher does in the classroom and what he says about his practice within the framework of PCK.
The concept of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) refers to the knowledge that teachers develop and use to teach specific content effectively. In chemistry education, PCK plays a fundamental role in allowing teachers to combine their mastery of scientific content with specific pedagogical strategies adapted to students as reported for electrochemistry (Oztay and Boz, 2022), chemical bonding (Van Dulmen et al., 2023), chemical equilibrium (Oztay et al., 2023), acids and bases (Aydin-Gunbatar and Akin, 2022; Boothe et al., 2023). Here are several aspects that show the impact of PCK in chemistry education in these articles:
• Facilitating the understanding of complex concepts
PCK helps teachers break down complex scientific concepts. By combining a deep knowledge of chemistry with adapted teaching strategies, teachers can explain difficult topics more.
• Adapting teaching to students’ needs
PCK enables teachers to understand students' specific learning difficulties and adapt their teaching to address them. For example, a chemistry teacher might be aware of common misconceptions and use adapted pedagogical strategies to overcome these challenges.
• Encouraging reflection on teaching practice
An important aspect of PCK in chemistry education is the teachers' ability to reflect on their teaching practice. This includes critically thinking about their teaching methods, modifying their strategies, and learning from their classroom experiences.
To our knowledge, the literature on PCK mainly includes articles concerning pre-service teachers (Tal et al., 2021; Deng et al., 2024 and those mentioned just above).
Here, we aim to cross-reference the knowledge teachers possess, as identified in their discourse, with the knowledge enacted in their teaching practice. In science education, and more specifically in chemistry, the duality between teachers' discourse (what they say they do) and their actual practice in the classroom (what they actually do) is a central issue in research on Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK). This gap between the pedagogical intentions expressed by teachers and their actual classroom practices has not really been explored in the literature. Teachers may have a solid and well-defined pedagogical understanding, but these intentions do not always translate into their actions in the classroom. Numerous reasons could explain that this gap arises from various contextual and professional factors. For example, teachers may be faced with external constraints (curriculum pressures, exam requirements, limited resources) that influence their ability to implement certain pedagogical strategies. In chemistry, this is particularly relevant as teachers often need to balance complex theoretical knowledge with practical experiments, which may not always be easily adaptable to everyday teaching. Teachers often adjust their practices in response to student reactions or real-time classroom interactions, which may lead to a disconnect from their initial pedagogical intentions. For instance, a teacher may express the importance of inquiry-based learning in chemistry but, due to time constraints or classroom management issues, may resort to more directive or transmissive teaching methods.
In chemistry, this gap between discourse and practice is even more complex due to the nature of practical experiments and discipline-specific knowledge (Johnstone, 1991). For example, a teacher might say that they promote the use of conceptual models to explain chemical reactions, but in practice, they might simplify these concepts to make them more accessible to students, thus sacrificing theoretical depth for immediate comprehension.
The alignment challenges between theory and practice in PCK are thus amplified in a field like chemistry, where teachers face tensions between inquiry-based teaching approaches, classroom time constraints, and curriculum goals (Crawford, 2007).
• Since we want to study the PCKs from the action in class, we place ourselves in a theoretical framework that allows its study. We therefore place ourselves within the framework of the JATD. The concepts of this theory that we are going to mobilize in this research are those of the learning game, of the contract of the didactic environment (the milieu). The action of the teacher and the pupil are modelled by learning games in which the stake is knowledge and in which the pupils can implement strategies to win the game. It is from the analysis of the action in terms of contract and environment that we infer knowledge in the teacher's action. We show from an example in the following how PCKs are inferred from this analysis.
We use the Joint Action Theory in Didactics (JATD) as theoretical framework developed by Sensevy (2011) to study the teaching practices. This theory is based on a paradigm of joint action: in the case of didactics, teaching and learning are associated and they are centered around a knowledge. In fact, the teaching–learning process can be considered as a communicative process. This theory postulates on the fact that learning practices cannot be understood without understanding the teaching practices.
The JATD relies on two concepts: the contract and the milieu and their relationship in order to reflect the dynamic development of this knowledge. The didactic contract (Brousseau, 1997) is all the behaviors of the teacher which are expected from the pupil and all the behaviors of the pupil which are expected from the teacher. The contract specifies the mutual positions of the participants about the task and is translated by the habits, the rules, the standards bound to a specified knowledge. The milieu involves the components of the pupils’ environment in which knowledge is integrated. The milieu includes the material elements (text, experimental devices, glassware in the case of chemistry) but also immaterial ones (actions of pupils and teacher, knowledge of the pupils, interaction with the teacher). By definition, the milieu is in permanent evolution, on one hand because this evolution is necessary for the learning of new objects of knowledge, and on the other hand because the objects of learnt knowledge may come to enhance the milieu. The didactic contract, being bound to the objects of knowledge, this evolution of the milieu is accompanied consequently by a change of didactic contract. So, the milieu and the contract are in interaction.
In the JATD, this dynamics between milieu and contract is modelled by the notion of didactic game, which allows to take into account the commitment of the actors (on the cognitive, motivational and emotional plans) as well as the way the game is won (what are the rules to win, for which stakes?). In the JATD, this is called a game of knowing, that means in order to win the game, the pupil has to implement the knowledge aimed by the teacher.
Aims of the study
The use of PCKs to analyse inquiry-based approaches has been described in particular for pre-service and in-service professional development programme of elementary school teachers. The results of these studies show a moderate relationship between teachers' view of inquiry and their willingness to implement it. Teachers are generally in favour of this approach, but do not necessarily implement it, preferring “teacher-centred approaches”. The authors highlight the need for inquiry training to improve some teachers' PCK in implementing inquiry in their classrooms (Avraamidou and Zembal-Saul, 2010; Papaevripidou et al., 2017; Sizer et al., 2021; Van Uum et al., 2021; Ladachart et al., 2022). Existing literature focuses mainly on the elementary school level for pre-service teachers. We want to take a look at what happens in the classroom during inquiry sessions at middle school level, where science (and chemistry) is gaining importance, and in the case of an experienced teacher. To do this, we are interested in the ordinary practice of a teacher who implements an inquiry-based approach. More specifically, the purpose of this study is to explore how teachers use inquiry in scientific classroom, by crossing qualitative data (from classroom observations) and quantitative data (obtained by questionnaire). Our objectives are:– to study how teachers bring inquiry to life in the classroom with an example (the case of Mr Grey). How does this teacher implement inquiry in his classroom session, and the legitimacy of such an approach, depending on the concepts involved?
– to identify a teacher's knowledge from two points of view, from his speech and from the analysis of his action. Can we identify links between this knowledge? Is what the teacher does in the classroom consistent with what he says about his practice?
Existing studies have often explored either the theoretical knowledge of teachers (i.e., what they know or claim to know about teaching chemistry) or their actual classroom practice, but few studies have focused on how these two dimensions interact and create a duality in the development of PCK. This duality between discourse and practice is crucial for understanding how teachers navigate between their theoretical understanding of pedagogical practices and the real-world constraints they face in the classroom.
Methods
Methodology
The mixed Methods approach is chosen for this study in order to combine the strengths of both quantitative and qualitative methods, providing a more comprehensive response to the research questions. The goal of the study is to understand the duality between teachers' discourse and practice in chemistry education, a complex issue that requires both a contextual understanding and measurable data to assess teaching practices. Qualitative methods (such as interviews and classroom observations) allow for capturing the contextual and subjective aspects of this duality, providing a detailed understanding of classroom interactions, teachers' perceptions, and pedagogical decisions. On the other hand, quantitative methods (such as questionnaires) allow us to quantify certain aspects of teaching practice and identify generalizable trends across a larger sample. This combined approach is therefore the most suitable to address the specific objectives of the study.Mixed methods are used in the humanities and social sciences (Bryman, 2007), particularly in education, training and health. The effectiveness of these methods was disputed at the outset, notably in defence of qualitative methods. The challenge of mixed methods is to apprehend the complexity of a situation using complementary methods and tools. It's about creating the conditions for analysing sets of facts that do not immediately seem compatible. Mixed methods are combinations of traditional methods within a single research project, in order to obtain more relevant results (Johnson et al., 2007). They are now recognized, and many researchers have proposed typologies of mixed methods designs (Teddlie and Tashakkori, 2003; Leech and Onwuegbuzie, 2009). Creswell et al. (2003) give a definition:
“the collection or analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data in a single study in which the data are collected concurrently or sequentially, are given a priority, and involve the integration of the data at one or more stages in the process of research” (Creswell et al., 2003, p. 212).
Their model has evolved over time (Creswell et al., 2003; Creswell and Plano Clark, 2007, 2011, 2018). We use their latest one. In their latest version of their model, Creswell et al. distinguish three core mixed methods designs (Fig. 2):
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| Fig. 2 Mixed method designs according to Creswell and Plano Clark (2018). | ||
The convergent design: the researcher collects and analyses two separate databases (quantitative and qualitative) and then merges the two databases for the purpose of comparing the results or adding transformed qualitative data as numeric variables into the quantitative database.
The explanatory sequential design: the researcher begins by conducting a quantitative phase and follows up on specific results with the second, qualitative phase to help explain the initial quantitative results.
The exploratory sequential design: the researcher starts by qualitatively exploring a topic. The design then builds to a second, quantitative development phase, and the final phase involves testing the quantitatively the feature designed in the second phase.
In this study, a convergent design of mixed Methods is used. This design allows for simultaneous data collection using both qualitative and quantitative methods, which are then integrated to provide a coherent overall view of the research question. The qualitative data are collected through classroom observations, while the quantitative data are gathered via a questionnaire administered to teachers. The convergent design is particularly appropriate in this context because it enables the collection of rich and contextual data while also ensuring generalizable results. The two data sets are analysed separately but later combined to provide integrated findings, enriching the interpretation of classroom teaching practices. As a result, this approach allows for triangulation of findings, thereby enhancing the credibility and validity of the study's conclusions. In fact, we conducted a qualitative study, the observation of a chemistry class session on the investigative approach. According to Baxter and Jack (2008), we situate our case study in the “descriptive” type, which is used by the following authors “to describe an intervention or phenomenon and the real-life context in which is occurred”. In parallel, we are setting up a questionnaire (24 closed questions and 1 open question), which we can therefore consider as a quantitative study. The aim of the convergent design is “to obtain different but complementary data on the same topic” (Morse, 1991) in order to best understand the research problem. We collected qualitative data and then quantitative data: we first observed the class session and then gave the questionnaire to the teacher (note that the questionnaire had already been written before our classroom observations). These two types of data are separate (one does not depend on the results of the other). They have equal importance for our research. Then we analyse the two data sets separately and independently from each other. The next step is to merge the results of the two data sets. This merging stage involves directly comparing the separate results in a discussion. In the final step, the researcher interprets to what extent and in what way the two sets of results converge or diverge from each other, to gain a better understanding in response to the overall aim of the study.
Data
A practical session based on the inquiry approach was filmed in an ordinary secondary school in France (Year 10). The teacher (Mr Grey) is experienced (more than 10 years). He is involved in science education and has even been a trainer himself in the inquiry approach. The experienced teacher was chosen from among those who implemented inquiry-based approaches and who agreed to be filmed during their session by the researchers. In France, the inquiry-based approach is essentially implemented in elementary and middle schools, and we are interested in chemical reactions, which is why we chose the Year 10 class. The session was recorded. The camera was placed in the back of the classroom in order to focus on the teacher. All of the recordings were transcribed. The session is conducted in French, and the words were collected, transcribed and analyzed in French. The translations used in this article have been verified. According to the theoretical framework of the JATD, we analyze what we can expect from the session (a priori analysis) in terms of games, based on the documents provided by the teacher and the official prescriptions. We analyze the session using the videos (a posteriori analysis). By comparing these two analyses, we can answer our research questions about this teacher's practice.For ethical considerations, parents were given permission to film their children, since they were minors. In these authorizations, after explaining our work, we inform parents that we are filming classroom sequences. These recordings are not commercially exploited, nor are they screened or played to the public; they are used only by the researchers, and solely for the purposes of their scientific work. The publication and communication of the results of this work, of course, respect the strict anonymity of the people and places concerned. The collection of these audio or video recordings from children can obviously only be done with the parents' consent. This is why we ask them to let us know whether or not they agree to such recordings being made of their children, by returning the completed and signed authorizations to us. it was not necessary for it to be approved by an institutional ethics committee. As for the teacher, he readily agreed to take part in our research.
A questionnaire on guidelines for science teaching submitted to secondary school teachers with open and closed questions, with three main themes (view of the inquiry approach, aims and purposes of science teaching and vision of science with the place of the model (Appendix 1)) was also administered to secondary school teachers. This questionnaire was developed by the researchers as part of another project on inquiry. This other study aimed at evaluating the impact of a training program for in-service teachers on their practices and on the learning of pupils, their motivation regarding science and their view of science. The goal of this program is to develop inquiry-based science teaching in the classrooms (Munier et al., 2021). The questionnaire, whose questions are presented in Appendix 1, was validated with teachers who were not involved in the project. Then, the teachers who took part in the project were able to fill in the questionnaire from their computers. Questions on evaluation were also asked. The translations have been checked since the questions were asked in French. Responses were given on a Likert scale (five possible choices). This questionnaire completes the qualitative study.
Description of the session
The session lasted approximatively 50 minutes. The class (28 pupils) is divided in two. In general, during sessions where pupils manipulate, there are fewer of them than during classroom lessons, for various reasons (safety, better monitoring by the teacher who has to note them as they manipulate, etc.). One part does graded exercises and the other does the inquiry. The following week the roles are reversed. It can be categorized as structured inquiry if we refer to Cheung's classification. For the inquiry, students work in groups of two people, there are seven groups. Every student receives a copy of the worksheet at the beginning of the class which they fill in during the inquiry (Appendix 2). The students are familiar with this type of class, the teacher having already used this type of teaching with these pupils during the year (inquiry versus exercises). They are evaluated during the inquiry (Appendix 3).The session of Mr Grey is based on an inquiry-based activity on ion recognition tests (criminal investigation, Appendix 2). The session was designed entirely by the teacher, in line with the official programs. The content of the sessions focuses on the identification of ions in solutions. Part of the Year 10 chemistry program is convened: “to implement characteristic tests of chemical species from a provided bank (test of recognition of ions and dihydrogen) and reactions between acid solutions and metals (reaction between iron and hydrochloric acid)” (MEN, 2015). The aim is to use chemical tests to identify four ions: Cu2+, Fe2+, Fe3+ (test with sodium hydroxide) and Cl− (test with silver nitrate). These tests should be known by the students of Year 10 and used, in particular, when analysing the reaction of iron with hydrochloric acid. This knowledge is therefore of a factual nature, based on characterization and analysis, making the model highly descriptive. Manipulation and technical problems can therefore be privileged in this chapter.
The teacher reminds them of the safety rules, describes the equipment that is available to them (listed in the distributed sheet, Appendix 2). The teacher then recalls the steps of the inquiry: the situation that triggers the experiment, the question chosen, the hypothesis, validation or invalidation of the hypothesis by the experiment and the conclusion. The idea is that there has been a crime in a laboratory and the question is to find the place and the suspect thanks to a piece of fabric found soaked in a solution containing ions. The previous week, the students received a theoretical course on ion recognition tests. The identification of an ion is based on the appearance and colour of the resulting precipitate. A precipitate is a solid suspended in a liquid that forms during a reaction.
To highlight:
Cu2+ ions, the reagent used is sodium hydroxide and the precipitate obtained is blue.
Fe2+ ions, the reagent used is sodium hydroxide and the precipitate obtained is green.
Fe3+ ions, the reagent used is sodium hydroxide and the precipitate obtained is rust-coloured.
Cl− ions, the reagent used is silver nitrate and the precipitate obtained is white and darkens in the light.
The resources teachers can find on this theme, in connection with an inquiry-based approach, lead to the setting up of a crime scene that leads to an investigation to find the culprit. We can see that there is a tension between these notions to be taught, which are rather factual, and the fact that experimental sciences must be taught by contextualizing them and by using a scientific approach. The inquiry approach, in its various stages, recommends a triggering situation anchored in reality that allows the students to be challenged. The initial question is to find the person responsible for the crime. The teacher is thus caught between two divergent points in the official instructions, contextualizing and building an investigative approach. How do teachers manage this contradiction in class, how do they implement an inquiry when this part of the program does not lend itself to it?
The analysis from the action is first presented (qualitative approach) and then the analysis of the questionnaires (quantitative approach). All analyses were carried out by the researcher.
Results
Qualitative approach
A priori analysis. We look at the overall game for this session from the preparation sheet and from the curricula. The objective that we reconstruct is to identify ions from a piece of tissue, whereas the solutions containing these ions all have the same appearance. If we look more finely at the games that we can anticipate (Fig. 3):
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| Fig. 3 Division of the session into games from the distributed documents. | ||
– Identify the ions potentially present: the ions present in the factory are Fe2+, Fe3+, Cu2+ and Cl−.
– Identify the tests in relation to the ions potentially present: these ions are identified with either sodium hydroxide or silver nitrate.
– Extract species present on a tissue: it is necessary to pass the ions present on the tissue into solution. The textile must therefore be placed in water to extract the ions and recover this aqueous solution.
– Distribute the solution in several tubes: it is necessary to divide this solution into two different test tubes since we have two tests to perform (the one with sodium hydroxide and the one with silver nitrate).
– Test with sodium hydroxide: if a precipitate forms, its colour indicates which ion is present.
– Test with silver nitrate: if a white precipitate forms, Cl− ions are present.
A posteriori analysis. The video allows us to analyse what is happened in the session. The session begins with a game “presentation of the material”, the teacher specifies that the pupils have at their disposal, a bowl of water, tweezers, a beaker and of course the cloth soaked with a solution of ions, he does not however specify what these various objects are used for or how to proceed. He does not suggest that they ask him for other materials if the pupils think they need them. The materials present can guide pupils in their manipulations: for example, the presence of a bowl of water encourages them to extract the ions present on the cloth. We might have thought that he would not insist on all the material available. The second game, which we had not anticipated, is that the teacher asks the students to do the tests to identify the ions seen in class and which will be necessary for the end of the investigation.
The implementation of these two games modified the anticipated games. Asking students to do the tests eliminates the first two games. The game presentation of the material modifies also these two games by weakening them, it is a question of determining how I can extract with the material at my disposal the ions present on the tissue. Finally, the fact of having done the tests also weakens the last two games, it is now a question of redoing what was done at the beginning of the session.
So, from the actions in class, we reconstruct the objectives of the session (Fig. 4):
 | ||
| Fig. 4 Reconstruction of the games from the observation of the session. | ||
– Perform ion tests on solutions whose composition is known,
– Extract the solution from a cloth using the equipment on the bench,
– Repeat the ion tests.
To understand the teacher's action, we need to understand what is at stake in the situation and the students' difficulties.
Difficulties related to the meaning of the task. At the beginning of the inquiry, the teacher asks the students to perform the ion recognition tests. They are asked to identify the ions present in the solution, even though there is a label with the names of the ions on the bottle, which is confusing. In addition, identifying the reagent in the test is difficult because there is no unknown solution. Also, there is ambiguity here about the term “reagent”. It could be the reactant in the sense of the chemical transformation, on the left of the arrow, the substance that is introduced at the beginning of the reaction and that reacts to give a product or it could be the reagent: the product that I add to the unknown solution but here the unknown solution is not called reactant (Fig. 5). From a chemical point of view, both are reagents, but the way the teacher presents the situation leads to a distinction between the two species: for the teacher, one is the ion to be tested, the other the only reagent.
 | ||
| Fig. 5 Two meanings of the term “reagent”. | ||
Difficulty related to the absence of the model of the chemical transformation. When the teacher refers to the testing of ions, he does not mention the chemical reaction since we use the properties of a product of the reaction to identify the ion to be tested. Also, the spectator ions, which are the species present in solution but not reacting, are not mentioned by the teacher. This can make it difficult for pupils to understand which ion is being tested, which ion is reacting and what is obtained at the end.
For instance, several pupils seem to be lost in giving the name of the ion he/she is looking for:
Citation 1:
Student: well we didn't understand the questions to do
Citation 2:
Student: it was ions of ar
Teacher: yes, that's the ions
S: silver chloride ions
T: chloride ions; the silver ions are, the silver ions are already here in your reagent which is the silver nitrate
S: ah yeah
Citation 3:
T: What did you characterise as an ion?
S: the hydroxide ions in it
Citation 4:
T: so there you have a blue precipitate, what do you deduce from it?
S: that it's iron and copper
Citation 5:
T: What do we characterise as ions?
S: silver ions
T: the ions, well no, because you use silver nitrate, that's the reagent
Citation 6:
T: so what did you characterise as an ion?
S: so the hydroxide ions in this one…
T: the hydroxide ions are there, this is your sodium hydroxide solution, it contains sodium hydroxide. It's not the hydroxide ions that we've identified.
S: the silver ions here
Citation 7:
T: a precipitate, the fact that it's blue, what do you deduce from that, what did you characterise?
S: well blue it is acidic
We see that the pupils have a lot of difficulties in identifying the ion they are looking for, they do not understand the question (citation 1), they confuse the ion to be tested with the reagent (citations 3, 5, 6) which may seem normal as they are both reagents. It seems that the absence of the chemical reaction model leads to a lot of confusion (citations 2, 4, 7), leading some pupils to talk about acid and base, which are not the topic of the day.
For the assessment knowledge, the teacher goes from group to group. To evaluate his pupils, the teacher has constructed a rubric (Appendix 3). He scores the four recognition tests (Cu2+, Fe2+, Fe3+ and Cl−) on one point each (4 points). He gives two points for the “sampling”, three points for the characterization/conclusion and finally one point for the tidiness and good behaviour of the pupils and the respect of safety instructions. This is a summative assessment which serves a different purpose in education than formative one. Formative assessment can help learning whereas summative one gives indication of what pupils can achieve (Harlen, 2013). The teacher's grid does not take into account the questions set out in the given document, as these questions reflect the inquiry procedure: no evaluation of the formulation of the question, the hypotheses put forward by the pupils and the experiment set up. On the other hand, 40% of the teacher's grade includes the 4 identification tests (not mentioned in the distributed document) and on the sampling of ions on the tissue, not explicitly requested and not in the program. For inquiry work, the teacher commits almost half the grade to a task consisting in repeating the recognition tests for the four ions seen in class the previous week. It is reasonable to ask why he uses such a notation, especially as he did not collect the worksheets (Appendix 2). According to the discussion we had with him before the session is to put a mark. In fact, the teaching hours for chemistry are too short to devote to both teaching and assessment. The pupils' results (given in Appendix 3) show that the work has not been successful, and that getting the pupils involved has not added any value to the learning process. What's more, we can see that the teacher was kind in distributing the marks, in fact for the tests (marked out of 1) we can wonder why many pupils have 0.5.
Here we report on an exchange between the students and the teacher, who is grading them.
T: in the Chauvin building, it works because you have characterised what there
S: well
T: come on, you're almost there
S: of the ions
T: yes
S: ions of
T: ions?
S:
T: no ah it's a pity because you were there at the end, we did all the tests at the beginning for that, you arrived at the end of the investigation, you almost succeeded and you slip, you take a banana skin and you slip
S: sodium
T: not at all, not at all, look at your course, it's the copper ions, unfortunately for you
S: ah
T: and yes, it's a pity, you were at the end, er, the sampling is good, the characterisation was almost it but it's not it
The students are not able to come to a conclusion after doing the identification test experiment, the teacher gives them the answer.
What can be said moreover, and which can be thought to be in contradiction with a curriculum knowledge, is that the students are evaluated on the sampling of the solution of the tissue which is not in the program and which moreover has not been taught a priori.
We now reconstruct two ePCK (Fig. 6).
 | ||
| Fig. 6 PCKs involved after the appearance of the two unanticipated games. | ||
The first one concerns the implementation of the two preparatory games. The game of presentation of the material transforms the game extracting from a piece of tissue. It is now a question of imagining a protocol from the material provided, not mentioned in the program. Moreover, for a group that had proposed an alternative protocol, i.e., cutting up the piece of cloth and putting it directly into the water, the teacher pointed out that he had not given them scissors as a first response.
S: we could have cut the cloth
T: either cut the cloth but I didn't give you scissors or extract with water in a beaker
The second one is the tests of the ions, which we had not anticipated. It could be a potential help for the pupils for the last part of the investigation. Indeed, these four tests could be used as controls for the tests to be carried out as part of the inquiry. The students could compare the colours obtained with those obtained from the unknown solution to find out the ion on the cloth, except that they are not used in this sense.
T: so there's no point in starting with the inquiry, because in the first place you have to do the 4 tests, right? You have 4 test tubes, you do 4 tests, ok and the 4 tests are the ones we saw in class.
T: there's no point in going so far, what I want to do first is to do the tests, there's no point in going any further, the 4 ions are there in the bottles, you put them in these test tubes, you have reagents there, and you characterise the ions.
T: There's no point in going any further, don't go any further, until you've done this, the 4 tests. I'll tell you one last time, here you have the 4 test tubes, the two reagents, the sodium hydroxide and the silver nitrate, the 4 solutions to be tested, the 4 ions that need to be identified, they're over there, OK, you do the 4 tests and you explain to me what you're doing.
T: then do the 4 tests and you call me.
T: I want to see the 4 tests
However, for an inquiry, these tests are not necessary: the pupils have already seen them in class, and are supposed to have learnt them. The aim is to identify the ion present on the tissue after it has been extracted. These two preparatory games are probably intended to help the pupils in this investigation, but in reality they turned the inquiry into an illustration of the course and a search for extra-curricular techniques.
When faced with pupils' questions and difficulties, the teacher refers them to their course, which, for him, has not been learnt. The teacher invites the pupils to reread their lesson, tells them several times that they have not learnt their lesson and finally projects it on the board.
The implementation of the strategy of doing the ion tests while the composition of the solutions is known and the teacher does not mention the chemical reaction leads to difficulties in the students that seem not to be perceived by the teacher. The disappearance of these two games due to the preparatory game, risks leading to a lack of understanding of the last games of the investigation, which would have made sense. For the teacher, the PCK difficulties are that the students do not know their lessons.
Quantitative results
The questionnaire on guidelines for science teaching submitted to secondary school teachers (questions on vision of science, implementation of the inquiry approach and aims and purposes of science teaching) was administered to secondary school teachers. More specifically, this questionnaire deals with different themes: teachers' vision of science and knowledge of inquiry and its different steps: problems, hypotheses, group work, debates and argumentation, institutionalisation, students' conceptions, students' evaluation, the place of error and models. We do not present here the questions that are far from our objective.Firstly, we focus on a few questions and on Mr Grey's answers. These results are shown in brackets.
Q1: “Developing knowledge about inquiry”: moderately important (3/5)
Q2: “Error is an obstacle to learning”: disagree (1/5)
Q3: “In order to get rid of their mistakes, students must solve a large number of application exercises”: quite agree (4/5): in agreement with the session
Q4: “Pupils' mistakes are valuable information that the teacher must use in the inquiry”: completely agree (5/5)
Q5: “Putting the students into activities allows them to progress”: quite agree (4/5).
Q6: “In your opinion, discussing with students what a model is and what it does is” (between very important/important/moderately important and not important, no answer or “I don’t know”): important
Q7: “In your opinion, discussing the limitations of models with students is” (between very important/important/moderately important and not important, no answer or “I don’t know”): very important
Q8: “Can you name a model in chemistry?” He quotes the model of the chemical reaction.
We notice that some of his answers do not correspond to what he practices in class. For him, it is moderately important for pupils to develop knowledge about inquiry (Q1). However, in class, he reminds the pupils of the different steps of the inquiry process and has them quote them. His answers on the model are in contradiction with what he does in class. According to his answers, it is important to discuss the definition and the usefulness of a model (Q6) and very important to discuss its limits (Q7). He also cites the chemical reaction model (Q8), which is relevant to his session. But in the classroom, he does not use a model, which causes a lot of misunderstanding among the pupils. His answers on error are surprising (Q4): during the session, he does not envisage that pupils can make mistakes and learn from them. For him, it is only a lack of work that explains their failure to make progress in this inquiry. In his view, mistakes are not an obstacle to learning (Q2), and yet during his session, he attributes all the students' mistakes to an unlearned lesson. However, he is in total agreement when he says that doing an exercise several times allows the pupils to stop making mistakes (Q3), which may explain the repetition of ion recognition tests. But this point of view is somewhat in contradiction with the constructivist model of inquiry.
What we can see from this analysis is that there is potentially a tension, a contradiction between the answers to the questionnaire and what we observe in terms of knowledge in action: Mr Grey does not mobilise the notion of chemical reaction at all in the session observed although for him talking about models is essential in chemistry.
We have just seen that the knowledge declared (via the questionnaire) is not reconstructed by the analysis of the action. It seems that it may be possible to have a “cohabitation” of contradictory knowledge, because this knowledge corresponds to completely different aspects of the teacher's activity. The declared knowledge is not dissociated from the practice but constrained by ergonomic aspects of the practice.
Discussion
The primary aim of this study is to address the gap in the literature by focusing on the dynamic interaction between discourse and practice in the development of PCK among secondary school chemistry teachers. By analysing how teachers claim to teach versus what they actually do in the classroom, this study sheds light on the tensions and adjustments necessary in their practice. Specifically, the study explores how teachers adapt and adjust their pedagogical intentions based on the real classroom conditions and student responses.By confronting teachers’ theoretical discourse with their actual practices, this study offers new insights into the mechanisms behind the development of PCK and the challenges encountered when trying to implement innovative pedagogical practices in the chemistry classroom. It thus explores how teachers juggle their pedagogical ideals with the practical realities, a topic that has not been sufficiently explored in previous work.
Mixed methods are used in education and training. They provide a means of describing, analyzing and understanding phenomena in these fields that would not be possible using quantitative or qualitative methods alone. In this way, they optimize results. Indeed, the complexity of the research object legitimizes the orientation towards mixed methods, which play the role, here, of complementary tools, in order to identify differences or recurrences. In our study, the qualitative method focuses on the teacher's discourse in the session observed, i.e. his practice. The quantitative method, through the questionnaire, not only compares him to other teachers, but also provides us with information on his positions with regard to his teaching. Comparing the results of these two methods enables us to answer our research questions, namely the implementation of the inquiry approach in the classroom and the teacher's knowledge, which can be identified both in action and in discourse.
• About the inquiry
Important steps of the inquiry are missing in this session, such as the sharing of hypotheses or exchange and/or communication phases. Mr Grey refers to the requirements of the official instructions, which recommend the use of investigation, and even get pupils to quote the different phases of inquiry, while, for the most part, he himself does not mobilize them during his session. However, the necessity of an inquiry in the case of the theme addressed here can be questioned. Indeed, ion recognition is a part of the programme that may not require such a session, although this type of police investigation is often encountered, as shown by the academy websites†. This type of survey is also used for other subjects, such as changing students' conceptions of the concept of DNA. If we return to the objectives of the inquiry-based approach, the situation devised by the teacher does not lead students to develop their critical thinking skills, nor does it seem to resolve the fact that they are less likely to develop misconceptions. Mr Grey is also constrained by time, less than an hour, hence the choice of a very guided inquiry. He thus set up a classic inquiry for the theme of ion identification, but the addition of the first two games, the presentation of the material and, above all, the request to redo the tests seen in class called the whole session into question. One might even wonder whether the objective is not essentially to find the crime scene rather than the process, as the problem of the situation is explicit while the scientific problem is implicit. This is the problem with a highly contextualised situation, which can sometimes lead to the teaching objectives being lost. Even the hypotheses are related to the context rather than the scientific problem.
• About the knowledge captured by the qualitative and quantitative studies
Many publications refer to the PCKs of pre-service teachers (Arrigo et al., 2022; Can-Kucuk et al., 2022; Conceição et al., 2022; Poti et al., 2022; Schiering et al., 2023). In this literature, we note that there is a debate about the methodology to know how to study this knowledge. Some researchers believe that they can be studied from the discourse. Baxter and Lederman (1999) say that if we look from the practice, we have access to only a small part of the knowledge. Baxter and Lederman (1999) consider that: “First, pedagogical content knowledge cannot be observed directly. By definition pedagogical content knowledge is partly an internal construct; it is a teacher's understanding of content-specific examples that best represent specific topics, and knowledge of common student difficulties with specific topics. When attempting to study a teacher's knowledge of “best examples”, we cannot rely exclusively on observational data as a teacher may use only a small portion of his/her accumulated store of examples during a particular teaching episode. We, as observers, would never see the examples that the teacher decided not to use. In addition, an observation would not reveal why the teacher chose to use some examples while avoiding others. Observations provide only a limited view of pedagogical content knowledge.” Others think that they can be studied from the point of view of classroom practices. Alonzo et al. (2012) say that we do not necessarily need to look at all this knowledge, since the students' learning depends on what the teacher implements during his session, consequently the knowledge that the teacher would not have mobilized while he had it does not interest us. Moreover, as Schön (1983) shows, it is not certain to have access to this knowledge by asking the teachers because some of this knowledge may be tacit for the teachers.
The difference between what Mr Grey says and what he does, raises the question of the link between knowledge and practice. There is no consensus in the literature, some authors think there are links, some think there are not, some think there are probably links but that it is complex. There are several important elements to take into account, as Crahay et al. (2010) say, it depends on the field of knowledge since these fields of knowledge have a cultural and ideological context. If we take the case of knowledge about inquiry in France, it is part of the program's requirements, and Ministry of National Education inspectors generally insist on this point, so we can think that teachers have been able to construct a discourse on inquiry without having consistent practices. Conversely, when it comes to knowledge about the nature of teachers' vision of science, where there is no clear-cut position on the part of the institution, one might think that teachers have less opportunity to construct a discourse on it.
Another point is that obviously there is no term-to-term correspondence between different types of knowledge or between knowledge and practice. What we have to look for are structures of knowledge and their translation in terms of knowledge in the action in context. For example, in the case of Mr Grey, the difference between this knowledge on the model (from the questionnaire and from practice) can be explained by the fact that the program does not insist on the model of the chemical reaction in the case of the ion tests and that what is as stake is a more technical side in this case, referring to the double status of chemistry as both technical and scientific. And yet, in his assessment, he gave no marks for manipulative technique. Indeed, this highly descriptive chapter, based on the characterization of ions, could lend itself to technical learning in chemistry. But he does not take the opportunity to work on manipulative or even theoretical aspects, such as the chemical reaction model. It seems that he is obeying instructions that call for the inquiry approach to be mobilized as often as possible. Here, this approach does not seem to help the students' learning, as the lesson given the week before would have been sufficient.
Conclusion
In this article, we analysed, in the context of a case study, a teacher's practice versus his position on teaching collected in a questionnaire. We observed discrepancies between his practice and his discourse. We focused our study on the inquiry-based approach used in science teaching, here in secondary schools. We focused on the implementation of this approach in the classroom.First of all, on the subject of inquiry, we believe that the teacher has to assume that he does not necessarily have to resort to an inquiry for certain parts of the program, and that certain questions deserve to be asked directly. This situation is, however, very typical of secondary school teaching in France, where solving a crime involving the identification of ions is often encountered. We see that there is no real construction of concepts, the hypotheses are more predictions and no scientific problems are posed. The only question is to find the place (and the criminal) of this murder: this initial question remains the only question of the activity and consequently leads to tasks that are not problematized.
This raises the question of the influence of official instructions on practices. Indeed, the latter encourage teachers to use the inquiry approach during science sessions, an inquiry that seems very rigid when one reads the programs. It seems that teachers do not have enough hindsight or training in this approach, and consequently seem to be trapped by it. And yet, Mr Grey has followed and trained other teachers on the inquiry approach, so, we can see that even a teacher who is an expert in the subject has difficulty in developing an inquiry.
Furthermore, during an inquiry, it is necessary to go back and forth when testing a hypothesis, and when it is not verified, it is necessary to come back to it in order to formulate new ones. Here, the approach is linear and very closed, following a very strict framework, with no possibility of exploring new directions (even cutting cloth with scissors is out of the question). However, this type of teaching is based on a constructivist model, where the student can put himself in the researcher's role and experiment as he does. This is clearly not the case here, an inductivist approach seems to be used here.
This case study highlights the contradictions of a teacher whose practice does not reflect his convictions. What he does in the classroom does not correspond to what he says in the questionnaire. While for him, the notion of model is very important, and mistakes are beneficial to learning, in this case, the teacher's practice is very different. Perhaps that is why his session is “wobbly”. This notion only needs to be learnt (as he keeps repeating), learning the colours of precipitates to identify ions. But, in that case, one wonders why he undertakes an inquiry that is poorly constructed. Even the assessment of his students is not built on this approach. We can see that for this part of the program, it is difficult to reconcile these notions with an inquiry approach that starts from an attractive situation but poses no scientific problem.
Internationally, inquiry-based learning is an innovative pedagogical approach widely used around the world. This method focuses on the student who has to investigate in order to solve problems, thus developing his or her critical thinking skills and curiosity about science (Almulla, 2023). All of this enables them to build up their knowledge and skills in a more advanced way (Cents-Boonstra et al., 2021; Kersting et al., 2023; Strat et al., 2023). The effectiveness of IBL has been demonstrated, with improved performance, increased motivation and the development of skills such as communication, collaboration and curiosity (Bruder and Prescott, 2013; Rahmi et al., 2019). However, there is still room for improvement. Teachers need to be trained and the use of equipment (even laboratories) needs to be considered (Engelbrecht, 2020; Hinostroza et al., 2024). Here, in fact, even an experienced teacher proposes a session that does not seem appropriate to the concepts covered, and seems trapped by the official instructions.
This study therefore distinguishes itself from previous research by offering a nuanced analysis of the discourse-practice duality in chemistry teaching. By addressing this issue, it contributes to a deeper understanding of PCK in action, not only as a theoretical concept but also as a practice in constant evolution within the classroom. It shows that teacher training and professional development must include strategies to reconcile discourse and practice for the effective implementation of pedagogical approaches. The main contribution of this study, in our opinion, lies in the fact that it provides a concrete example of a middle school teacher's inquiry practices. We are aware that our study is limited, as are all case studies. Nevertheless, these rich and promising results need to be supplemented by other examples, so that we can generalize this case study to look at how other investigative approaches are implemented on different topics in chemistry, and thus see what their pedagogical contributions are. It would be interesting to see how this teacher implements inquiry when covering other concepts: does he use it systematically? Or for which concepts? We also need to look at the practice of other teachers: do they use it for this notion? and if not, for which ones? It is crucial that these approaches, which are also costly in terms of time and materials, have a real pedagogical impact on student learning. As the inquiry approach is recommended by institutions in many countries, this implies training teachers in this method by setting up teacher professional development and then looking at their effectiveness. It is then necessary to look at how teachers construct and apply their knowledge of the inquiry, as well as the coherence between training and classroom practice.
Further studies on the links between practice, classroom action and what teachers say about teaching need to be explored. This search for coherence between practice and statements could lead to improvements in teaching, as here with the flawed implementation of an inquiry, perhaps unnecessary in this case or at least conceivable in a different way. In this way, we aim to contribute to the debate on research questions that cross qualitative and quantitative data, which are often complicated to relate, as the literature has shown.
Implications
The results of this study confirm the presence of a marked duality between teachers' discourse (what they say they do) and their actual practice in the classroom (what they actually do). This gap is not merely an observed phenomenon but rather reflects the tensions between discourse (idealized and formulated pedagogical practices) and practice (actual classroom actions, influenced by multiple constraints). The qualitative data show that while teachers claim to support pedagogical approaches such as inquiry-based teaching or inductive methods, these approaches are often circumvented or adapted based on classroom conditions, student responses, and external constraints (time, exams, resources). The quantitative data reinforce this observation by showing that teachers who state they use innovative approaches often implement more traditional practices in most cases.The practical implications of the results from this study are significant for teacher education, curriculum development, and ongoing professional development in chemistry education.
• For Teacher Education: the results suggest that initial training in chemistry and pedagogy, which focuses solely on pedagogical theories, may not be sufficient to prepare teachers for the realities of the classroom. It is crucial that future teachers are trained to reconcile discourse and practice, learning not only pedagogical strategies but also developing critical reflection on their practices. Teacher training should include simulations or classroom observations that help teachers better understand how their pedagogical intentions may clash with the everyday realities of the classroom.
• For Curriculum Development: the results indicate that flexible pedagogical decision-making and the ability to adapt teaching practices based on context are essential. Curriculum designs should encourage teachers to adopt pedagogical approaches that allow them to adjust their teaching based on the specific needs of students, while still achieving learning goals. The gap between theoretical pedagogical ideas and their actual implementation in the classroom should be reduced.
• For Ongoing Professional Development: chemistry teachers should benefit from professional development sessions that not only reinforce their theoretical knowledge of innovative teaching approaches but also provide tools for implementing these approaches in real classroom settings. These sessions should address the practical dilemmas teachers face, such as time management, limited resources, and the pressure of assessments. Effective professional development must enable teachers to move from theoretical reflection to practical application, encouraging self-evaluation of their practices and providing concrete strategies for adjustment.
To enhance the impact of chemistry teaching, it is essential to integrate reflection on the discourse-practice duality into teacher education and professional development. The results of this study show that teachers must be supported not only in understanding the theoretical concepts of teaching but also in how to adapt and implement these concepts in real-world contexts. By making this reflection more explicit, teacher training can better prepare future educators to face the pedagogical challenges they will encounter in their professional practices.
Conflicts of interest
There are no conflicts of interest to declare.Data availability
The data supporting the results of this study are not available – these are classroom videos and are therefore not publicly available. The available data is given in the appendix.Appendices
Appendix 1 The questionnaire
| Very important | Important | Moderately important | Not important | I don't know | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deconstruct erroneous initial knowledge. | |||||
| Developing student autonomy. | |||||
| Develop knowledge of the inquiry process. | |||||
| Develop their ability to apply a scientific approach. | |||||
| Develop students' vision of science. |
| • In the classroom, things need to be organized in such a way that students make as few mistakes as possible. | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| Strongly disagree | O | O | O | O | O | strongly agree |
| • Errors are an integral part of the knowledge-building process. | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| Strongly disagree | O | O | O | O | O | strongly agree |
| • In science, learning to identify and correct errors is a key activity for students. | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| Strongly disagree | O | O | O | O | O | strongly agree |
| • For effective learning, the teacher must rectify pupils' errors as quickly as possible. | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| Strongly disagree | O | O | O | O | O | strongly agree |
| • Error is an obstacle to learning. | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| Strongly disagree | O | O | O | O | O | strongly agree |
| • To eliminate errors, the student must solve a large number of application exercises. | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| Strongly disagree | O | O | O | O | O | strongly agree |
| • Errors provide valuable information that the teacher must use in the inquiry process. | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| Strongly disagree | O | O | O | O | O | strongly agree |
| • Teaching methods have evolved, but the lecture is still the standard. | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| Strongly disagree | O | O | O | O | O | strongly agree |
| • Putting students into action helps them to progress. | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| Strongly disagree | O | O | O | O | O | strongly agree |
| • Group work promotes science learning. | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| Strongly disagree | O | O | O | O | O | strongly agree |
| • To be able to learn, students need a well-structured course as quickly as possible. | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| Strongly disagree | O | O | O | O | O | strongly agree |
| • In your opinion, allowing students to manipulate models is: | ||||
| Please select only one of the following: | ||||
| Very important | Important | Moderately important | Not important | I don't know |
| O | O | O | O | O |
| • In your opinion, allowing students to develop models is: | ||||
| Please select only one of the following: | ||||
| Very important | Important | Moderately important | Not important | I don't know |
| O | O | O | O | O |
| • In your opinion, getting students to distinguish between model and reality is: | ||||
| Please select only one of the following: | ||||
| Very important | Important | Moderately important | Not important | I don't know |
| O | O | O | O | O |
| • In your opinion, discussing with students what a model is and its functions is: | ||||
| Please select only one of the following: | ||||
| Very important | Important | Moderately important | Not important | I don't know |
| O | O | O | O | O |
| • In your opinion, discussing the limits of models with students is: | ||||
| Please select only one of the following: | ||||
| Very important | Important | Moderately important | Not important | I don't know |
| O | O | O | O | O |
| • The purpose of working with models is (indicate your level of agreement with each of the following statements from 1 strongly disagree to 5 strongly agree): | |||||
| Choose the appropriate answer for each item: | |||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | |
| help students better understand the knowledge involved | O | O | O | O | O |
| help students understand how science works | O | O | O | O | O |
| develop students' interest in science | O | O | O | O | O |
| Give an example of a model: | |||||
Appendix 2 Instructions given to pupils
| Abominable crime in the sun in the Montpellier region. Pupils lead the investigation. An investigation with twists and turns… |
| 1. Triggering situation: on her birthday, Anna, a 40-year-old married mother of two, is found dead at the Montpelier drug factory lying next to her car in the parking lot. The surveillance cameras show that the victim's body was moved, but the suspect cannot be identified! |
| “Let's proceed by order,” says the police lieutenant. We don't have a motive for the murder yet. Jealousy, settlement of account… First, we must determine exactly where the murder took place. The surveillance cameras simply show that the murderer can only come from one of the three buildings of the drug production unit. The first elements of the investigation show that in each of the buildings is manufactured a different drug.” |
| Here is the plan of the place: |
 |
| “One of the few pieces of evidence we have,” says the lieutenant, “is this stained piece of cloth taken from the victim's clothing. It is up to you to tell me in which building the crime took place. Go to the laboratory and call me when you have something new! Good luck, I feel that this case is not going to be easy to solve… |
| 2. Which question did you retain? |
| 3. Hypothesis: (give your opinion) |
| At this stage, not having manipulated yet, you can state several hypotheses. Obviously, your opinion will depend on the “information” you will get from the stained piece of cloth taken from the victim? |
| H1: |
| H2: |
| H3: |
| Other hypotheses: |
| 4. Validation or invalidation of the hypothesis by experiment: |
| Materials: You have • Tissue (evidence), • Pipette, • Tweezers, • Beakers, • Water dish, • Reagents but also protective gloves, lab coat and glasses. |
| Diagram of the experiments with captions and explanations in a few sentences: |
| 5. Conclusion: (institutionalization) |
| Based on your experiments, was the victim in the Lavoisier, Einstein or Chauvin building? Justify. |
| 6. To go further: Rebound! |
| Two people were inside the building. Each was on a different production line: |
| – Suspect 1, noted S1, on the line using copper ion and demineralized water |
| – Suspect 2, noted S2, on the line using copper ion and saline (presence of chloride ions). |
| With the evidence and the appropriate reagent, perform the experiment to identify the suspect. |
| Scheme: |
| Conclusion: which suspect is the guilty one? Justify. |
Appendix 3: Teacher's evaluation rubric
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Footnote |
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