Pre-service teachers’ knowledge, beliefs and predispositions to teach argumentation in their disciplines

ABSTRACT

Despite growing emphasis on learning to argue and arguing to learn as educational outcomes in the secondary curriculum, a gap remains between these curricular goals and teachers’ practices. The present study seeks to understand this gap by surveying 158 pre-service teachers about their knowledge, beliefs and predispositions related to argumentation and learning. Results reveal a strong, unanimous value for argumentation among pre-service teachers, combined with a vague understanding of what it means to learn and teach argumentation within their academic disciplines. In addition, we found a contradiction between pre-service teachers’ belief in the importance of learning to argue and their reluctance to use instructional time to teach it. Finally, we did not find differences in pre-service teachers’ perceptions across majors. We conclude with recommendations for fostering pedagogical content knowledge in argumentation to pre-service teachers, particularly in content-area methods classes.

KEYWORDS:

• Pre-service teacher knowledge and beliefs
• Argumentation
• Disciplinary thinking
• Teacher education

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (Grants:PRX1800039 and RTI2018-097289-B-I00), and the Mexican Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Geolocation information

The study area of the present research was located in Barcelona (N 41° 23‘19’‘, E 2° 9’ 32’’)

Notes

1. Effect size for crosstabs is Cramer’s V, calculated as the square root of Chi² N(k-1). K is the smaller number of rows or columns. V = square root of 15.5/153 (2-1) = 0.32.

2. Effect Size was computed for nonparametric statistical tests according to Pallant (2010). SPSS Survival Manual: A Step by Step Guide to Data Analysis Using IBM SPSS. Open University Press.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Mexican Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología. Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades [PRX1800039 and RTI2018-097289-B-I00,RTI2018-097289-B-I00]; Mexican Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología.