Survey of In-service Teachers’ Argument Skills

Abstract

Toulmin (1958) proposed that arguments are constructs of proof. Recently, arguments formed from “claims” and “evidence,” as well as the “reasoning” that ties them together, have been introduced into science education as a practical application of Toulmin’s Argument Pattern. Although it is important for the teachers who instruct students to construct arguments, in-service teachers’ argument skills on scientific content have yet to be demonstrated. The purposes of this study are to investigate in-service teachers’ abilities to construct arguments in the sciences and to compare them with the results of the children. A survey of 76 in-service teachers in elementary, lower secondary, and upper secondary schools was conducted following Sakamoto et al. (2012). We converted arguments about circuits and the brightness of miniature light bulbs into points. We found that many points were achieved when making claims, and when questions were answered accurately. However, regarding furnishing evidence and reasoning, the responses were insufficient. In particular, the teachers were found to have the same issues as elementary school children in giving sufficient evidence without omission, and in their use of scientific principles for reasoning. In addition, in-service teachers’ argument skills were deemed insufficient, regardless of type of school, gender, whether they held a lower secondary school or upper secondary school science certificate, number of years of work experience, mode of instruction in the classes taught, or specialization. Our future tasks are to look more deeply into the trend revealed in this study by sampling more data, and to develop a program that improves in-service teachers’ argument skills.