Action research on pre-service elementary teachers’ understandings of the scientific method and the use of evidence in a science and technology teaching course

ABSTRACT

Our past experiences in science teacher education inferred that using scientific practices in science teaching courses and supporting pre-service teachers’ efforts to integrate these into their teaching allow them to gain confidence in analysing and interpreting empirical data. However, those efforts sometimes do not provide sufficient help for pre-service science teachers and they may struggle to understand science as well as the significance of evidence in science learning and teaching practices. Thus, this action research study examined a novel teacher training approach that focuses on improving pre-service teachers’ understanding of science and their ability to integrate evidence into their teaching practices. We worked with 75 pre-service teachers in a science and technology teaching course at the elementary teaching program of a private university in Turkey. Teaching of scientific practices was modelled in terms of the Benzene Ring Heuristic and the model-evidence link (MEL) discussions were included in the training model to be able to teach how to discuss evidence in scientific fields. Our study data was subsequently gathered from various sources, including pre-service teachers’ posters, video recordings of reflection sections that occurred before and after the implementation of the posters, and individual interviews. Analyses of the results suggested that the heuristic and MEL discussions helped pre-service teachers to achieve a systematic and holistic understanding of the scientific method. However, some pre-service teachers still misunderstood the scientific process even after the heuristic’s and MEL discussions’ implementation. Despite an increased emphasis on the qualities that defined scientific evidence, some teachers also still had difficulty understanding applying the principles of scientific evidence in their own work. Based on these findings, we argued that current scholarly understandings of science teacher training may be insufficient to some extent, and that educational institutions should make efforts to direct some resources to this problem.

KEYWORDS:

• Pre-service elementary teachers
• scientific method
• scientific evidence
• action research

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Gaye Defne Ceyhan and Aysegul Cilekrenkli, who contributed to this study’s data analysis. We would also like to thank the team that worked on the project supported by TUBITAK and the European Union Marie Curie Co-Funded Brain Circulation Scheme Fellowship (291762/2236) and to Sibel Erduran, who held a visiting professorship at Bogazici University, leading a project entitled ‘Revisiting Scientific Inquiry in the Classroom: Towards an Interdisciplinary Framework for Science Teaching and Learning.’ This project gave us the inspiration to structure the course described in this study. We also would like to thank to Doug Lombardi, who introduced us to model-evidence link diagrams.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.