Science Teachers' Spontaneous, Latent or Non‐attendance to the Validity of Conclusions in Reported Situations

Abstract

In today's science curricula, especially the Science‐Technology‐Society (STS) approach, ‘process skills’, including aspects of critical thinking and logical analysis, are heavily stressed. Many studies—globally‐‐have shown serious deficiencies in secondary schools, and also in (student‐) teacher populations. The question arose whether, and to what extent, science teachers critically and spontaneously attend to the logical structure of situations, do so only after prompting, or completely fail to do so. The ‘Analysis of Scientific Passages Test’ (ASPT) was constructed to ascertain whether respondents would spontaneously identify invalid conclusions as the common denominator of logically isomorphous situations, would do so only after being informed that the conclusions were invalid and be able to give reasons for this fact, or would be unable to do so at all. The test was administered to 76 practising science teachers attending an STS summer course at a major university in the mid‐western USA. Zero scores were obtained by 13% in the test, 17% obtained full scores, the rest occupied transitional positions; but no less than 51% did not attend to the logical structure and conclusions of the situations without being told to do so. The findings‐‐in line with previous ones on similar aspects of ‘process skills’ by this and other authors‐‐were interpreted to represent serious shortcomings in science teachers' pre‐ and inservice education, leading to their failure to allocate the same emphases and priorities to their teaching activities as one might expect them to do considering curricular demands and expectations.