A mixed method study on pre-service teachers' informal reasonings for nuclear energy usage

According to Ministry of National Education Curriculum, an environment is required to take place for students to defend their opinions in an efficient way with different reasons and to raise counter-arguments with the purpose of confuting their friends' thoughts. To develop this kind of environments, it is necessary to carry out Socioscientific issue curriculum effectively. The purpose of this study is to reveal informal reasonings of the pre-service teachers who are to become the practitioners of curriculum for nuclear energy usage in terms of decision-making, informal reasoning and argument modes. The practice group of the study consists of senior 100 pre-service teachers, chosen by criteria sampling method from purposive sampling methods, studies in department of social sciences education, science teaching and primary school teaching in state university of a city somewhere in Central Anatolia Region. To examine pre-service teachers' informal reasonings for nuclear energy usage within holistic and rich view, mixed method research model, which uses qualitative and quantitative research methods together, is practiced. Exploratory sequential mixed method is used because informal reasonings of pre-service teachers are investigated thorough integrally by investigating first qualitative then making qualitative findings quantitative. To collect the data, open-ended survey questions, developed by Wu and Tsai (2007) are used. During the data analysis stage, first qualitative data analysis is made then qualitative analysis are subjected to quantification. At the qualitative data analysis stage, content analysis made use of while quantitative data analysis stage Mann-Whitney U-Test, Kruskal-Wallis test, crosstab and chi-square test are taken into use. In addition to results obtained from the study, it is determined that the pre-service teachers greatly have evidence based and positive point of view on establishment of nuclear power plant. When the given answers are examined, a case is emerged which is social and ecology oriented informal reasonings of pre-service teachers are more outweigh. In presented argument modes supportive argument numbers are pretty great compared to rebuttal argument numbers. In terms of informal reasoning level, it is possible to say pre-service teachers have a high level of reasoning. The graduate program must include classes to make argumentation studies consisting socioscientific issues on the purpose of making the pre-service teachers, who are to become the practitioner of socioscientific issues in curriculum, gain knowledge and experience.