The effect of inquiry based physics experiments on preservice science teachers' inquiry based science teaching self-efficacy, conceptual understanding and science process skills

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of inquiry-based physics experiments on preservice science teachers' inquiry-based science teaching self-efficacy, conceptual understanding and science process skills. The study group consisted of 60 pre-service teachers in total, studying the undergraduate program of Science Teaching, Faculty of Education, Bartın University. They participated to the study in spring semester of the academic year 2016-2017 and enrolled the General Physics Laboratory-II course. The study which used randomized quasi-experimental design with pre-test – post-test and control group, designed as a convergent parallel mixed design study. The practices were planned according to the content of the General Physics Laboratory-II course and the activities were designed in conformity with the course content. Experimental practices were performed within a 10- week period. The inquiry-based experiments were used for the experimental group in the learning process while traditional confirmatory experiments were used for the control group. Inquiry- Based Science Teaching Self-Efficacy Scale, which was developed by Smolleck (2004) and adapted to Turkish language by İnaltekin & Akçay (2011), was used to collect data. In addition, The Electricity and Magnetism Conceptual Understanding Test and Science Process Skills Observation Form which were developed by the researcher and also semi-structured interviews were used as data collection tools in the study. IBM SPSS Statistics 22 software was used for the analysis of quantitative data, while descriptive analysis was employed for the qualitative data. As a result of the analysis conducted, it was found out that inquiry-based experiments did not show an effect on pre-service teachers' inquiry-based science teaching self-efficacy. It was revealed that pre-service teachers' conceptual understanding improved at a higher rate than the control group. In addition, it was observed that there was an increase in the scientific acceptability levels of the answers given by experimental group and also in the number of answers included in this category. Similarly, it was found that inquiry- based experiments were more successful than confirmatory experiments in terms of improving the science process skills of pre-service teachers. It is estimated that the results of this study will significantly contribute to the planning processes of teacher education programs as well as to the future studies on inquiry-based learning. Moreover, it is believed that the activities used during practices and presented as an appendix at the end of the study will serve as a helpful resource for both researchers and teachers.