Examining two Turkish teachers' questioning patterns in secondary school science classrooms

This study examined low and high level teachers' questioning patterns and classroom implementations within an argument-based inquiry approach known as the Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) approach, which addresses issues on negotiation, argumentation, learning, and teaching. The level of the teachers was determined by the students' writing scores. This study was conducted in Turkey with seven teacher for preliminary study. Because scoring writing samples examines the students' negotiation level with the different sources and students learn scientific process, as negotiation, which they may transfer into their writing, in classroom, two teachers were selected to represent low and high level teachers. Data collection involved classroom observation through video recordings. The comparative qualitative method was employed throughout the data analysis process with including quantitative results. The research questions that guided the present study were: (1) How are low and high level teachers, determined according to their students' writing scores, questioning patterns different from each other during classroom discourse? (2) Is there a relationship between students' writings and teachers' questioning styles in the classroom? Analysis of Qualitative data showed that teachers' classroom implementations reveal big differences based on argumentation patterns. The high level teacher, whose students had high scores in writing samples, asked more questions and the cognitive levels of questions were higher than the low level teacher. Questions promote an argumentative environment and improve critical thinking skills by discussing different ideas and claims. Asking more questions of teacher influences students to initiate (ask questions) more and to learn the scientific process with science concepts. Implicitly, this learning may improve students' comparison in their writing. Moreover, high level teacher had a more structured and organized classroom than low level teacher.