Prospective Science Teachers’ Views about the Process of Preparing Problem Scenarios and Designing Experiments to Produce Solutions: An Action Research
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Keywords:
Problem based learning, PBL, prospective teachers, science educationAbstract
This study focuses on identifying the difficulties encountered and experiences gained by the prospective teachers as they worked in the process of preparing problem cases and designing experiments to solve those problems. It was planned to carry out this study as an action research in order to identify the views of prospective teachers regarding the preparation and application process of problem scenarios and the experiments designed to solve scenarios and the guidance of an academician. The study sampling is a total of 44 prospective teachers, who are in the 3rd grade in Science Education Department of Education Faculty in a state university in northwest Turkey and took the course of Science Education and Laboratory Applications-II in the spring semester of 2014-15 school years. Study data was collected by using a questionnaire to identify the views of prospective teachers regarding the preparation and application process of problem scenarios and the experiments designed to solve scenarios and a questionnaire to identify the views of prospective teachers regarding the guidance of an academician in the preparation and application process of problem scenarios and the experiments designed to solve scenarios. Prospective teachers’ responses to open-ended questions were analysed by using content analysis technique from among qualitative analysis techniques. According to the results of this study, the prospective teachers had difficulties mostly in the areas of preparing original scenarios, designing original experiments for solutions and correlating scenario-gain-experiment-fiction; they thought that more attention should be paid to those subjects and they mainly had experiences in those areas during the process. In addition, another study result is that the use of PBL method at secondary school level depends on the suitability of gain-subject.
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