Pre-service Teachers' Understanding of Scientific Inquiry

In this poster we present a mixed method approach to research pre-service elementary teachers’ understanding of scientific inquiry. A survey was developed referencing the National Science Education Standards for Inquiry. Forty-one elementary education students participated in the survey. Likert-scale survey results were analyzed quantitatively. Two open ended survey responses were coded using the standards and emergent themes. Temporary results show that pre-service teachers display highest level confidence with the questioning of experimentation aspects of inquiry, medium confidence regarding data collection using different tools and generating explanations, and low confidence in communicating, publishing, and reviewing. Different representations—Likert-scale choices, textual answers, and drawings—yield different patterns in the medium confidence aspects. However, high and low-confidence aspects remain high or low regardless of specific representations. Our ongoing goal is to compare results with those from an earlier study at the beginning of the 21^st century. We hope to capture some evolutionary patterns in pre-service teachers’ understandings of scientific inquiry and generate implications to elementary science education, particularly concerning the evident shift away from an explicit usage of the term “scientific inquiry” in the Next Generation Science Standards.