New Perspectives in Science Education

Argument- Driven Inquiry (ADI) is an instructional model that aims to provide authentic and educative laboratory experiences for students (Sampson, Enderlee, Grooms, & Witte, 2013). ADI includes eight interrelated stages to ensure students an opportunity to engage in meaningful science learning by presenting scientific problems, designing investigations, and communicating and critiquing results. The aim of this explanatory study is to investigate the effect of ADI model on pre-service science teachers’ scientific writing skills. The study was conducted with a science course laboratory offered in a university. Twelve pre-service teachers participated in this study and completed three ADI activities. The activities were related to density, rate of dissolution, and germination.  They completed eight stages of ADI and submitted three laboratory reports. The researchers scored participants reports using a rubric independently and examined their improvement. The scoring rubric, including three parts namely argument structure, argument content and writing mechanics, developed by Sampson, et.al. (2013) was used to score the reports. The analyses of participants’ reports showed that reports written by pre-service teachers improved over the course of the study significantly. The results of the study have a potential to contribute the literature on science teaching and teacher education in a way that it provides evidences for the effectiveness of ADI on the development of pre-service science teachers’ scientific writing skills.