How Close Student Teachers ’ Educational Philosophies and Their Scientific Thinking Processes in Science Education

ABSTRACT. For being guidance, science teachers should be framed by strong content knowledge to construct scientific thinking process as a scaffold. The aim of this research was to look at student teachers ’ scientific thinking processes. Then, the results compared with their educational philosophy. During the study, two different instruments were used. For measuring each student’s scientific thinking processes, the authors developed two scenarios. In addition, educational philosophy self-assessment test was conducted to the thirty-two junior student teachers. In this study, the combinations of qualitative and quantitative methods were used. All data were in the form of paper and pencil. Iterative process of open coding was used to analyze the scenarios. The educational philosophy self-assessment test was ported into a Microsoft Office Excel program 2003 to calculate frequency and percentage. The results showed that there was a big gap between what students thought and what they did. Even though they supported constructivism in education, they tended to make interpretations in terms of their common sense. The authors stated that the gap between scientific thinking and common sense and habitude interpretations could only be closed by using scientific thinking processes as a scaffold. KEY-WORS: educational philosophy, scientific thinking, psychological orientations, scaffolding 2 Actualité de la Recherche en Education et en Formation, Strasbourg 200