The Investigation of Pre-service Science Teachers’ Reflective Journals

Abstract

Higher order cognitive skills have become a crucial aspect and aim of science education all over the world. It is highly crucial that the teachers who teach science hold these skills. The purpose of this study is to determine first-year pre-service science teachers’ levels of reflective thinking and investigate the relationship between their reflection level and academic achievement. The data were collected via weekly reflective journals kept by a group of first-year pre-service science teachers in chemistry laboratory. The participants kept one journal a week for ten weeks. One of the researchers provided weekly feedback for the journals in order to help the participants improve their reflection quality. The journal entries were analyzed through content analysis in order to reveal the general tendency in the participants’ journals. Based on the content analysis seven main themes were emerged; feelings/attitudes, self assessment, learning from activities, preparation for laboratory/prior knowledge, procedure of lab work, group work, opinion about the experiment. Although results showed that the first-year pre-service science teachers’ reflection levels are very low, a positive significant correlation was found between the pre-service teachers’ reflection levels and academic achievement. A longer and more detailed training for keeping reflective journals are suggested to improve reflection skills of the pre-service science teachers.