Evaluation of an elementary teacher education program to promote argument instruction

Abstract

While previous teacher education research on argumentation primarily targeted science teachers, we will provide insights on where to begin teacher education for beginners in situations, where argumentation instruction is not yet common and time constraints impede teacher training. We conducted a short-term program that lasted 160 minutes, with 61 graduate students from a Japanese graduate school of teacher education as participants. It explained arguments, and taught the participants how to construct, score, and plan arguments that they could use in their classes. We conducted the argument construction and evaluation task to examine the presence or absence of components and the correctness of the arguments. The non-parametric quantitative response data were analyzed using SPSS by Wilcoxon signed rank-sum test and Mann-Whitney U test. The results showed that the post-test revealed significant improvements in both tasks. This program may be effective for non-science beginner teachers.