A case study of helping in-service science teacher to teach with the science-technology-society approach and its influence on students’ scientific argumentation

Abstract

This study aims to develop a training workshop to promote the in-service science teachers’ ability to teach the topic of Force and Motion to grade 10 students by using the Science-Technology-Society (STS) approach and explore its impacts on students’ scientific argumentation patterns. The research methodology was a case study with one participating science teacher, who fully attended the STS workshop designed by the authors. After finishing the workshop, the researchers followed up the teacher by observing his teaching and students’ learning with the STS approach and collected all related artefacts. The students’ scientific argumentation patterns were analyzed by using the Toulmin’s Argument Pattern (TAP) framework. The findings showed that the training workshop helped the participating teacher design the STS-based learning unit in Force and Motion. Also, most of the learning stages in the STS approach promoted the students to generate high quality of scientific argumentation. The study concludes by suggesting further methods of enhancing high quality scientific argumentation in a STS-based training workshop for in-service science teachers.