The investigation of the relationship between pre-service science teachers' quality of socioscientific argumentation and their the nature of science understanding

In this study, it has been aimed to examine the possible bidirectional relationship between pre-service science teachers' nature of science understanding and their socioscientific argumentation quality. Moreover, the extent to wich the explicit nature of science and the process of socioscientific argumentation affect the pre-service teachers' opinions about argumentation and the nature of science has been investigated. This study was conducted with 56 preservice science teachers who were studying at the third grade in Science Education at Kastamonu University Faculty of Education, Department of Primary Education in the fall semester of 2014-2015 academic year. The participants were divided into two groups-27 participants were included in the experimental group and 29 participants were involved in the control group whereas 29 of participants were incorporated in the control group. A mixed-method approach composed of both qualitative and quantitative research designs was used in this study. While the preservice science teachers in the experimental group were included in the explicit nature of science and socioscientific argumentation process, the candidates of the control group were participated in the process in accordance with the student-centered activities. Data collection took place for 11 weeks and the "Nature of Science as Arqumentation Questionnaire (NSAAQ)" was applied to all of the pre-service science teachers participating in this research both at the beginning and at the end of the data collection process. After the evaluation of the points obtained from this questionnaire, the preservice science teachers in the experimental group were divided into three groups of four as low, middle and high in the scope of maximum variation sampling according to their understanding of the nature of science. To examine the socioscientific argumentation quality of the participants in the low, middle and high groups, the data were collected by means of three scenarios named as "Production of Electric Cars", "Mobile Phones Threaten the Human Life" and "Golden Rice". Lastly, semi-structured interviews on the nature of science, argumentation and science education were conducted with six pre-service science teachers randomly selected from the experimental group at the beginning and end of the process. The quantitative data were analyzed with SPSS program while the qualitative data were analyzed through the inductive content analysis method. Independent sample t-test and paired sample t-test were performed on the data collected from the sample to define the significance of difference between the pre-test/post-test scores of the experimental and control groups. Moreover, to describe the significance of difference between the argumentation qualities of the low, middle and high groups, firstly the qualitative analysis was conducted by means of argument evaluation scale (to obtain the quantitative results) and then Kruskal Wallis H-Test was carried out with the quantified data. The qualitative data inferred from semi-structured interview questions were analyzed by content analysis method. The results evaluated from the qualitative and quantitative analyses indicate that nature of science understandings significantly affect the socioscientific argumentation quality. At the same time, it is detected that in terms of the nature of science understandings of the experimental group and control group, there is a significant difference in favor of the experimental group. Finally, it is concluded that the teacher candidates' views on the nature of science, argumentation and science education indicate a positive change in the experimental group. By correlating the results obtained from this study with the relevant literature, possible suggestions and implications are listed in terms of the contribution to the science education literature, improvement of learning and teaching quality and pre-service teacher education.