“What’s in the Bucket?” – a Case Study of How an Inquiry-Based Activity Can Give Student Teachers Experience With Argumentation in Science

Student teachers must become aware of their own argumentation skills in order to know how they can support their future pupils in argumentation. Therefore, we have created the inquiry-based activity "What's in the bucket” to give student teachers experience with argumentation in science. In this activity, the student teachers were presented a bucket with unknown content and through the eight steps of the Argument-driven-inquiry model, they were supposed to develop scientific arguments of the bucket’s content with claim, evidence, and reasoning. The aim of the study is to analyse data from the implementation of the activity to reveal in what ways the activity gives student teachers experience with the three knowledge domains. Data were collected through observation and audio-recordings of 20 student teachers in their fifth and final year, who worked in groups. The data were analysed with content analysis. The results revealed that the activity facilitates the student teachers to gain experience within all three domains: In the conceptual domain, the student teachers used their background knowledge to design and carry out data collection, and they discussed a number of topics and investigations related to the science. The epistemic domain emerged through the student teachers' discussions about what characterizes valid evidence and reasoning for their claims, and experiences with the review process of the report. The social domain was included since the student teachers had to communicate, argue, and discuss scientific knowledge at all steps. However, our results revealed a missing focus on reasoning and the argumentation session were of varying quality. Based on our results, we will discuss how the activity can include better scaffolding to improve the student teachers’ arguments.