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Primary pre-service teachers’ skills in planning a guided scientific inquiry

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Abstract

A study is presented of the skills that primary pre-service teachers (PPTs) have in completing the planning of a scientific inquiry on the basis of a guiding script. The sample comprised 66 PPTs who constituted a group-class of the subject Science Teaching, taught in the second year of an undergraduate degree in primary education at a Spanish university. The data was acquired from the responses of the PPTs (working in teams) to open-ended questions posed to them in the script concerning the various tasks involved in a scientific inquiry (formulation of hypotheses, design of the experiment, data collection, interpretation of results, drawing conclusions). Data were analyzed within the framework of a descriptive–interpretive qualitative research study with a combination of inter- and intra-rater methods, and the use of low-inference descriptors. The results showed that the PPTs have major shortcomings in planning the complete development of a guided scientific inquiry. The discussion of the results includes a number of implications for rethinking the Science Teaching course so that PPTs can attain a basic level of training in inquiry-based science education.

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Notes

  1. These activities are also denominated practical work by some authors (e.g., Abrahams and Millar 2008; Caamaño 2012).

  2. Royal Decree 126/2014, February 28, establishing the basic curriculum of primary education. Boletín Oficial del Estado, n° 52, 2014, March 1. Available at http://www.boe.es/boe/dias/2014/03/01/pdfs/BOE-A-2014-2222.pdf.

  3. Steel is fundamentally an alloy of iron with a small admixture of carbon (between 0.03 and 2.14 %). It thus also has high electrical conductivity, although the magnitude depends on the proportions of the mixture.

  4. In this context, there was no intention to insist on the factors on which electrical resistance depends (length, thickness, and resistivity). In any case, if it had been put forward by any of the teams, variation in resistance with the same given type of material would only depend on geometric dimensions, since all the testing would be carried out at room temperature, so that the resistivity would remain constant.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Spain) under the grant EDU2013-41003-P.

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  1. Departamento de Didáctica de las Ciencias, Facultad de Ciencias de la Educación, Universidad de Sevilla, Calle Pirotecnia S/N, Sevilla, 41013, Spain

    Antonio García-Carmona, Ana M. Criado & Marta Cruz-Guzmán

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  1. Antonio García-Carmona
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  2. Ana M. Criado
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  3. Marta Cruz-Guzmán
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Correspondence to Antonio García-Carmona.

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García-Carmona, A., Criado, A.M. & Cruz-Guzmán, M. Primary pre-service teachers’ skills in planning a guided scientific inquiry. Res Sci Educ 47, 989–1010 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-016-9536-8

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