Pre-service primary teachers' argumentation in socioscientific issues

Abstract

Even in the context of a university science course, students make and attempt to defend unscientific claims in personal and scientific contexts. This research examined a random sample of rhetorical arguments submitted by 130 first-year students in a pre-service primary teaching program for the presence and quality of research evidence and reasoning. Students were strongly encouraged to review the evidence with an open mind before taking a stance. Arguments were analysed by identifying elements of Toulmin's Argument Pattern (Toulmin, 1958) and evaluating the quality of and relationships between these elements using SOLO Taxonomy (Biggs & Collis, 1982). For the most part, students' claims aligned with scientific consensus; for example, that climate change is almost certainly anthropogenic. However, a small number of students submitted pseudoscientific claims, such as that fluoride should not be added to the water supply. Such claims lack evidence, contradict existing evidence that comes from a strong methodological basis, or rest on weak evidence that comes from a poor methodological basis. Sometimes these claims rely on faulty reasoning or logical fallacies. Concern is not only for those students who have submitted pseudoscientific claims, but also for those students who have presented claims that reflect scientific consensus yet defend those claims with shoddy evidence or poor reasoning. If students cannot distinguish between scientific and pseudoscientific claims, evidence and reasoning, how will they make robust decisions about health, how money should be spent, and how and what they will teach their future students?

Pre-Service Primary School Teachers’ Application of the Features of the Nature of Science to Socioscientific

“…Another research involving pre-service primary school teachers discovered that some preservice teachers make unscientific claims about socioscientific issues. Additionally, pre-service class teachers who made scientific claims provided insufficient proof and reasoning (Pezaro et al, 2014). Such results support the notion that pre-service primary school teachers may influence their future pupils to assert their claims that are not supported by scientific evidence.…”

“…The use of socioscientific issues in the lessons also enables students to develop scientific literacy and positive attitudes towards science (Gomley et al, 2019;Hodson, 2013;Zeidler, 2014). In socioscientific issues, teachers should be able to effectively use science and nature of science concepts to enable students to engage in effective decision-making processes, as well as to structure and analyze presented arguments (Pezaro et al, 2014).It is well known that incorporating socioscientific issues into science education helps students have a better knowledge of science topics, improve their argumentation abilities, and comprehend the nature of science (Levinson, 2006;Zeidler & Sadler, 2008;Zohar & Nemet, 2002;Khishfe & Lederman, 2006).…”

Development of Argumentation Based Concept Cartoons for Socioscientific Issues: A Case of Science and Art Centers

“…Günümüzde SBK olarak klonlama (Brooks ve Lusk, 2011;Khishfe, Alshaya, Boujaoude, Mansour ve Alrudiyan, 2017;Topcu vd., 2010), genetik çalışmalar (Gottweis, 2002;Robillard, Roskams-Edris, Kuzeljevic ve Illes, 2014), biyoteknoloji (Gürkan, 2013;Sürmeli ve Şahin, 2010), nükleer enerji (Eş, Işık Mercan ve Ayas, 2016;Ozturk ve Yilmaz-Tuzun, 2017;Tekbıyık, 2015), genetiği değiştirilmiş gıdalar (Chang ve Chiu, 2008;Walker ve Zeidler, 2007), alternatif tıp (Saher ve Lindeman, 2005;Quinn, Taylor, Coll ve McClune, 2016), aşı (Lee ve Grace, 2012;Pezaro, Wright ve Gillies, 2013), küresel ısınma Öztürk, 2017) ve iklim değişikliği (Byrne, Ideland, Malmberg ve Grace, 2014;Stenseth, Braten ve Stromso, 2016;Zangori, Peel, Kinslow, Friedrichsen ve Sadler, 2017) gibi konuların araştırmalarda sıklıkla ele alındığı görülmektedir. Bunların yanında dövme (Stuckey ve Eilks, 2014), kobay hayvanlar (Agell, Soria ve Carrió, 2015), kök hücre (Concannon, Siegel, Halverson ve Frayermuth, 2009), yolların tuzlanması (Çalık ve Cobern, 2017) ve bazı yerel SBK (Atasoy, 2018;Atasoy, Tekbıyık ve Yüca, 2019) daha az sıklıkla araştırılmıştır.…”

Preservice teachers' sociopolitical consciousness in light of the racial disparities highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic

“…receiving SSI based science instruction. These studies have investigated things such as argumentation and reasoning of PSTs (Karışan et al, 2017;Ozturk & Yilmaz-Tuzun, 2017;Pezaro et al, 2014;Topçu et al, 2011), how PSTs discuss SSIs in class (Kim et al, 2014), critical thinking skills (Gul & Akcay, 2019), and understanding the cultural aspects of science and SSI (Evagorou & Puig Mauriz, 2017;Özden, 2015). It is important that PSTs first experience SSIs as students so that they better understand SSIs as gain some of the skills that they will attempt to teacher their students when they plan and implement SSIs based lessons.…”