Abduction in Teaching: Results of a Qualitative Research

Abstract

The paper discovers the presence of abduction in teachers’ activities and emphasises the role of trichotomous systems (abduction, deduction, induction) in discovering human reality. The paper focuses on the presence of abduction in education sciences research, and its main goal is to detect abduction in teaching activities and classroom interaction. Abduction is a type of reasoning requiring philosophical, logical, and psychological background, distinct from induction and deduction, and it contributes to a viewpoint in social research that strives to make research in human reality easier to understand. The qualitative study involved explores the presence of abduction in teachers’ communication based on unstructured observation. The observation was carried out in a primary school. The objects of observation were the Geography, Art, and PE classes of the same teacher. The data of the class observation were recorded verbatim. The records were processed using an inductive, data-driven method after the classes. The reliability of the process was ensured by intracoding. The results of the observations reflect the presence of abduction in classroom interaction. The results showed that abduction appeared in the Geography, Art, and PE classes observed, and every class witnessed right and wrong abductive conclusions. The paper is relevant to anybody interested in the appearance of abduction in education sciences research and aims at completing the arsenal of tools available for analysing teachers’ activities.