Hermeneutic perspectives of pre-service science teachers about science

Abstract

Science education emphasizes the development of individuals’ ability to make comments, reasoning, and critical reflection while expressing their scientific thoughts. In this sense, future science teachers have great responsibility to develop those skills of the learners and their meaningful learning. Many researches emphasize hermeneutical thinking for disciplines such as mathematics and science to create meaningful learning. The current research aimed to reveal pre-service science teachers’ hermeneutical perspectives about science and to determine their existing ideas. For this aim, scientific problems presented to pre-service science teachers via scenarios, and how they developed their approaches to solve these problems, and whether they used hermeneutics in this process were examined. The hermeneutical perspectives of pre-service teachers were selected as a single case -by using qualitative research method- to have a deep understanding of their hermeneutical perspectives. The research group consisted of nine third-year-students. Semi-structured interviews prepared by the researchers were applied before and after the intervention in the research conducted for 14 weeks in Science Teaching Laboratory Applications-I course. The data were analysed by a descriptive analysis method. It has been evidenced that science-related hermeneutical perspectives of the pre-service science teachers have developed as a result of the problem-based scenario studies.