Abstract:

At present the proposal on pedagogical and disciplinary standards for initial teacher training in Chile (Law 20.903, 2016) requires them to have a conceptual mastery in addition to promoting in the students the competences of scientific thought and attitudes toward science. This initiative, and in agreement with the curricular bases of elementary Natural Science teaching centered on inquiry and experimentation of natural phenomena from the great ideas of science (MINEDUC, 2012), requires teachers to have a broad understanding of scientific activities and the nature of science, beside overcoming traditional teaching practice, particularly teaching which is notoriously lacking the use of experimental activities in the classroom (Cofre et al., 2010).

Teacher training in this field has devoted little space for its development or, at best, the inclusion of experimental procedural “recipe” type practice, with the absence of the promotion of scientific thought competences like questioning, hypothesizing, explaining, and arguing, among others. From this standpoint, it is inherent that teacher training in Elementary Educational Pedagogy in the field of Natural Science can be offered in natural as well as experimental environments with the purpose of modeling the structuring concepts of science (chemistry, physics and biology) and an approach to their theoretical knowledge and the activity that belongs to scientific work. In this context, learning how to ask questions is the key, because the benefits of their use in the classroom are several, requiring a teacher capable of asking questions that will have an influence in the construction of scientific knowledge and the understanding of the science itself in your students.

This qualitative research (Mertens, 2015) was aimed at characterizing the construction of explicative questions, as scientific thought competences of 65 students in the Natural Environment Comprehension I and III in the third and fifth semesters of the Elementary Pedagogy career of a Chilean State University in an academic semester during the implementation of small research in the fields of biology, chemistry, and physics. The data obtained from the adaptation of heuristic diagrams (Pérez and Chamizo, 2013) were coded and analyzed by means of the proposal of Roca, Marquez and San Martí (2013) for the use of questions and the ATLAS TI 8 software.

The results showed that the questions asked by the teachers in training present difficulties when stated as researchable when they try to include the scientific knowledge and variables relations. In terms of their content, this refer mainly to phenomena observed from the social and everyday context, which mainly represent biological rather than chemical and physical models. As to the demand or propose, it is striking that even though the teachers ask more questions to establish relationships and confirm them to set up generalizations (61.9%), they dare to ask questions that imply predictions or hypotheses (38.1%). The study has allowed to identify an advancement in stating questions as scientific thought competence among the teachers in training which show disciplinary interests and disciplinary and methodological mastery which in some way refer to a concern for learning about them.

Keywords:

Questions, initial teacher training, elementary education, scientific school activity, school research.