New Perspectives in Science Education

The purpose of the study is to explore the types and coping methods of dilemmas which science student teachers experienced during student teaching. For this, we collected the 131 dilemma journals which 34 pre-service science teachers wrote during 4-weeks student teaching in South Korea. Results showed that there were five categories of the contexts of dilemmas, that is, ‘science class’, ‘home room teacher’, ‘science teaching except class’, ‘training program’, and ‘interactions with peer student teachers and supervising teacher’. Analysis of the dilemmas based on the science teacher standards showed that only 50.4% of dilemmas was recognized that they had relevance to science teacher standards by student teachers. To dealing with these dilemmas, student teachers considered the dilemmas as the conflicts of irreconcilable alternatives rather than the opportunities of conciliation and compromise, therefore, they choose just one alternative (80%) and only 20% of dilemmas was resolved by compromise choice. Based on the results, we discussed the implications for teacher education.