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.
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.