Pre-Service Teachers' Professional Vision of Argumentation Opportunities in Their Analysis of Videotaped Science Classroom Episodes

To foster scientific argumentation in the classroom, science teachers need to be able to notice and interpret situations in their lessons that are starting points for argumentation discourses. To sustainably promote these skills, which we denote as a professional vision of argumentation opportunities, it seems crucial to start training teachers as early as their pre-service phase. Thus, we have developed a vignette-based practice activity with a category system that trains this vision. In this exploratory study, qualitative content analysis was used to examine eight pre-service science teachers' (PSTs) responses in this practice activity. The results show that the PSTs were able to successfully identify and describe argumentation opportunities in videotaped chemistry and physics lessons. However, these PSTs had difficulties in explaining the contentious moments in the opportunities they had identified and in predicting suitable instructions that could promote argumentation. Overall, PSTs' professional vision improved during a nine-week intervention, but differences-e.g. regarding the subject matter of a vignette or PSTs' prior knowledge-also became apparent. The paper identifies such influencing factors and provides recommendations for using the practice activity in science teachers' professional development.