Secondary School Students’ Views About the Use of Argument-Driven Inquiry in the Science Courses

Abstract

The vision of science teaching is to train individuals who can produce and evaluate scientific knowledge by following the scientific processes like the scientists in order to understand and be able to produce solutions to the problems they encounter in real life. Ensuring this is only possible by using effective teaching methods. One of these methods is the argument-driven inquiry method. In parallel, the purpose of the study is to identify secondary students’ views about the use of the argument-driven inquiry in the science courses. In the research, the case study has been adopted. Participants of the study consists of twelve seventh-grade students in a secondary school located in the Aegean region in the 2016-2017 academic year. The research was carried out in six weeks. In the research, the 7th grade "Electric" unit was taught with argument-driven inquiry activities. In the research, the participants were given an electrical situation (serial-parallel connected circuits etc.). The research data was collected by a semi-structured interview form regarding the use of argument-driven inquiry method in science classes which is consisting of 18 open-ended questions in order to determine students' opinions. Content analysis method was used for analysis of the data obtained from the research. As a result of the research, it was determined that the participants mostly gave a positive opinion on the use of the argument-driven inquiry in science lessons. Students who gave negative opinions about the argumentation-based inquiry method said that they did not like this model on the grounds that they were afraid to express their own opinions in the lesson and they did not like to talk in the lesson. As a result, it can be said that the literature contributes to the determination of student opinions on the use of the model.