Abstract The curriculum reform of science education is shifting towards transdisciplinary approaches. This study aimed to investigate how chemistry teachers conceptualized transdisciplinary practice in the era of curriculum reform. The theoretical framework included essential characteristics, discipline relations, values, influencing factors of transdisciplinary practice. Participants consisted of 241 Chinese in-service chemistry teachers. A questionnaire survey and an in-depth interview were conducted to explore their conceptions of transdisciplinary practice and the reasons. The findings indicated that they tended to understand the essential characteristics of transdisciplinary practice from the pedagogical perspective, but not completely up to the transdisciplinary level; when representing the relations between various disciplines, they agreed with disciplinary integration and problem solving, stressed the role of chemistry, but less valued engineering; they incomprehensively described the values of transdisciplinary practice, mainly focusing on its contributions to student development; they believed transdisciplinary practice implementation can be effectively promoted by positive student factors, but it is faced with great external challenges. The reasons for their conceptions stemmed from relevant documents, own subject background, views on educational goals, decoupling from exam evaluation, etc. These results suggest that more measures need to be taken to improve teachers’ conceptions of transdisciplinary practice and the implementation of transdisciplinary practice.
Liu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.