Preservice Teachers’ Abilities and Confidence with Constructing Scientific Explanations as Scaffolds are Faded in a Physics Course for Educators

A mixed-methods, quasi-experimental design was employed to explore how the Claim, Evidence, and Reasoning (CER) framework along with written, verbal, and peer scaffolds would influence early childhood/elementary and elementary/middle childhood preservice teachers' (PSTs) abilities to formulate scientific explanations within a physical science course for educators. Two sections served as the intervention group and learned how to construct scientific explanations with the supports described above. Two additional sections served as the comparison group and received no additional support for how to construct explanations in science. Five pre/post scientific explanations, five scientific explanation quiz questions, five scientific explanation journal entries, and five self-reflections were collected and analyzed to address the research questions. From our results, we can conclude that the CER framework along with the fading of scaffolds can assist PSTs with learning how to construct scientific explanations. There was a statistically significant difference between the intervention and the comparison groups' abilities to provide sufficient evidence to support their claim and justify their claim and evidence with scientific reasoning across all data sources. The results also show the intervention groups' ability to form a scientific explanation was not influenced by the fading of the scaffolds; rather certain content areas were more challenging than others. Providing evidence that required mathematical and computational thinking was more challenging for both groups. Reasoning continued to be the most difficult component of an explanation for PSTs to construct. These findings have important implications for the design of science content courses for PSTs.