Improvement of Students’ Scientific Epistemological Beliefs and Metacognitive Awareness through Argument-Based Inquiry Teaching

Year 2020, Volume: 7 Issue: 2, 122 - 144, 29.11.2020

Yurdagul Bogar

Abstract

The main aim of the study is to obtain a more detailed understanding on how teaching argument-based inquiry helps develop students’ scientific epistemological beliefs and metacognitive awareness. Argument-based inquiry was used as the teaching method in this research. In research done up to now in science education, this method has not been used to determine the scientific epistemological beliefs and metacognitive awareness of middle school students. Consequently, this study is important in terms of filling this vacancy in the area. In this study, whole-class teaching experiment method was used in the teaching period. In this method, the researcher takes up the role of the teacher, and at the same time, combines theory and practice in a classroom setting. The present study was carried out in one of the public middle school. The researcher used two scales as pre and post-tests, they are Epistemological Beliefs Questionnaire and Metacognitive Awareness Inventory. The researcher used both descriptive statistics and inferential statistics so as to analyse the data. The researcher put forward descriptive statistics as percentages, mean, range, standard deviation, minimum, maximum, skewness and kurtosis on the other hand for inferential statistics the researcher used paired-sample t-test to analyse the mean differences between pre and post-tests. The results demonstrated that there is a significant difference between the mean scores for scientific epistemological beliefs pre-test and post-test. However, the results showed that no significant difference between the mean scores for metacognitive awareness pre-test and post-test.

Keywords

Scientific Epistemological Beliefs, Metacognitive Awareness, Argument-Based Inquiry

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