Abstract
Exploring Pre-Service Primary School Teachers’ Informal Reasoningand Argumantation Levels on a Socio-Scientific Issue
The study aims to analyzepre-service primary school teachers’ informal reasoning modes,
argumentation level sand decision-making modes on a socio-scientific issue. Also, in the
content of the study, the pre-service primary school teachers’ informal reasoning on a
socio-scientific issue was explored. In the research, the case study design, which is one
of the qualitative research methods, was used. The participants of this study were 56
pre-service primary school teachers attending the faculty of education in a government
university. The participants were 3rd-year students and the application conducted in
Science and Technology Teaching Class in 2017-2018 Academic Year, Spring Term. To
investigate the participants, informal reasoning modes, and argumentation levels, and
decision making modes, a scenario was written by the researchers. The scenario narrated
an interesting dilemma which was an environmental problem-related event. The title
of the scenario was, “How can we rescue the lake?”. And at the end of the scenario,
four open-ended questions were posed to the participants. The first question aimed to
assess the participants’ decision making modes. The second one aimed to evaluate the
participants’ ability to generate supportive arguments for their decisions. The third one
aimed to assess the participants’ ability for counter argument construction. The fourth
one aimed to evaluate the participants’ ability for rebuttal construction. In this study,
the participants’ decision-making modes were divided into two categories: Intuitive and
evidence-based. The arguments of the participants according to their informal reasoning modes were analyzed in four categories such as “social-oriented,” “ecological-oriented,
“economic-oriented,” and “science/technology-oriented”. The level of argumentation of
the participants was determined based on the framework of the argumentation level model
developed by Osborne, Erduran and Simon (2004) through Toulmin’s Argumentation
Model. The findings of the study showed that pre-service teachers act mostly based on
their in tuitions when deciding on a problem they encounter. It was determined hat preservice
teachers used predominantly ecological-oriented reasoning while producing
arguments related to an environmental problem. The number of participants who proposed
social, economic and science/technological arguments waslow. And this indicated that
the participants did not approach the problems from multipleper spectives. Also, when
the argumentation levels of the participants were examined, it was seen that most of them
produced arguments at Level 2.
Keywords
Toulmin Argumentation Model, Informal Reasoning Mode, Decision-Making Mode, Environmental Problem, P
