Pre-service teachers' reflective judgment skills in the context of socio-scientific issues based inquiry laboratory course

There are certain threats embedded in scientific development that confront society. Gaining practical and instrumental experiences in addressing topics related to the major challenges that confront society today can be possible by tapping the socio-scientific issues as a part of science teaching and learning. This research aimed to explore pre-service teachers' reflective judgment skills in socio-scientific issues based inquiry science laboratory course. The participants of the research were 20 pre-service teachers at a research oriented public university. Qualitative case study research design was used in this study. The laboratory manuals and semi-structured interviews were used as data collection tools. Data were analyzed by using King and Kitchener's (1994) reflective judgment framework. Results of the study showed that pre-service teachers' reflective judgment scores tended to increase from the first experiment to the last experiment. Results suggested that exploring reflective judgment in socio-scientific contexts is beneficial for allowing pre-service teachers to actively engage in knowledge construction.