Improving preservice teachers’ scientific argumentative writing through epistemic practices: a learning progression approach

ABSTRACT

Improving preservice teachers’ argumentative competence is a social and educational imperative. This study focuses on the contribution of a sequence of learning tasks, designed as epistemic practices and following a learning progression approach, to enhancing student teachers’ scientific argumentative writing. The participants were 47 preservice primary teachers who enrolled in a Developmental Psychology course, and one lecturer. Preservice teachers progressively acquired the vast majority of aspects involved in scientific argumentative writing. The most important difficulties experienced by the preservice teachers revolved around intertextuality and the creation of theses. Key conclusions on this teacher education experience are presented in the final section of the paper.

KEYWORDS:

• Scientific argumentation
• argumentative writing
• learning progression preservice teachers
• epistemic practices

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Catalan Unit for Research and University Grants Management (‘Agència de Gestió d’Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca’) under Grant [2014 ARMIF 00019];