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preservice teachers as they pursued the sophisticated task of managing student inquiry in the science classroom. Success in developing student teachers who are practicing inquiry can occur when preservice students receive many opportunities to experience and practice inquiry teaching and when positive role models are present during student teaching.
The theoretical framework underpinning this study is constructivist in nature, assuming that humans work to make sense of their world by piecing together knowledge and beliefs to create explanations for what is seen and experienced. As the prospective teachers participated in inquiry investigations, as they read about inquiry, and as they drafted and implemented inquiry lessons, their ideas about what inquiry is and how inquiry is conducted would be influenced by their prior experiences and ideas.
Teaching science as inquiry is another component of the theoretical framework for this study whereby the research questions of this study focus upon the importance and prominence inquiry instruction has in science education. For decades, we taught science as a body of knowledge, setting aside the skills and abilities of doing and understanding the scientific enterprise as these ideas and abilities remained far off in the work of advanced graduate students in research universities (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; Deters, 2004; Hackling, Goodrum, & Rennie, 2001). The Iowa-Secondary Science Teacher Education Program (Iowa-SSTEP) served as the setting of this study as this program was designed to assist prospective teachers in developing more informed understandings of scientific inquiry as well as fostering the development of their abilities to implement inquiry pedagogy in the science classroom.
This study follows 11 preservice teachers over four semesters of science teaching methods courses, tracking their development of inquiry science teaching and learning from the standpoint of their