Abstract:

The incorporation of perspectives from the philosophy of science in science education has been advocated for several decades e.g. Duschl, 1990 . Yet the overlap of science education research with revived efforts in the application of philosophy of science to science education has been minimal Kauffman, 1989 . For instance, minimal attention has been paid to how disciplinary orientations to knowledge and knowledge construction particularly as suggested by specific philosophies of science can contribute to the theory and practice of science education Erduran, 2001 . Within this framework, it is not surprising that chemical education literature has barely addressed the applications of philosophy of chemistry in chemical education e.g. Erduran&Scerri, 2002 . Argumentation studies, on the other hand, have emerged as a key area of research in science education in recent years e.g. Erduran& Jimenez-Aleixandre, 2008 emphasizing the role of theory and evidence in the justification of knowledge claims of science. In this paper, we aim to bring together these two distinct bodies of literature in order to investigate domain-specific ways of reasoning and argumentation in science, particularly focusing on the patterns for pre-service chemistry teachers. We illustrate an empirical study conducted with 114 pre-service teachers from various subject areas using questionnaires on the NOS and argumentation. Our analysis illustrates comparisons of different cohorts of pre-service science teachers with respect to their understandings of NOS and argumentation. The results indicate that there are significant correlations between some aspects of NOS e.g. nature of scientific knowledge and argumentation for chemistry pre-service teachers

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