Understanding and practice of argumentation: A pilot study with Mainland Chinese pre-service teachers in secondary science classrooms

As previously mentioned, argumentation is a relatively new word in science education, especially in Mainland China where few research studies have been conducted and published in the past. In this study, the three participating pre-service teachers were found to have limited understanding of argumentation in the area of science education. This lack of understanding of argumentation is evidenced by the fact that 1) they had limited understanding of argumentation; 2) they did not recognize the role of argumentation in scientific practice and had never heard of argumentation in science education; and 3) they did not consider the objectives related to argumentation in science education.

These three pre-service teachers showed different skills of composing argumentation. When the topic was related to their daily life, two of them showed relatively good skills. However, their daily argumentation levels were significantly higher than those of their scientific argumentation. When faced with scientific propositions, all three showed weak skills of argumentation. They were even reluctant to compose argumentation for those scientific propositions which have been widely accepted by others. Their responses hint that these pre-service teachers’ views on science knowledge are relatively traditional. The findings of this study mean that two points should be addressed: one is that these pre-service teachers do have the potential to compose argumentation; another is that their traditional views on scientific knowledge may be an obstacle to their argumentation.

Corresponding to their limited understandings and skills of argumentation, the argumentation which took place in their lessons was obviously also very limited. The lessons given by these three pre-service teachers showed a typical IRE pattern with few open questions raised. As a result, little argumentation took place. In this study, we cannot say that lack of argumentation in the science classroom is solely a consequence of the science teachers’ poor understandings and skills of argumentation. But we can say that this study shows that coherence exists in the pre-service teachers’ understandings, skills and instructional practice. It also reminds us that the relationships between teachers’ understanding, skills and instructional practice need to be further explored in the future.

Many factors may contribute to the pre-service teachers’ limited understandings of argumentation. The limited amount of research published on argumentation in science education in Mainland China may be one of the significant factors that caused the pre-service science teachers to have never heard of argumentation in the area of science education before. There are also many factors leading to the lack of argumentation taking place in their classrooms. A systematic review to examine the weaknesses and strengths of the education system may be helpful to us in identifying the underlying reasons for this situation. At present, to introduce the international experiences of argumentation and to investigate the model which is relevant and suitable to the implementation of argumentation in Chinese science classrooms is a feasible road for science educators in Mainland China. However, directly introducing argumentation may cause many problems and may not necessarily bring the expected results. To carry out some localization studies with regard to argumentation would be meaningful.