The Relations between Scientific Epistemological Beliefs and Goal Orientations of Pre-Service Teachers

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relations between pre-service teachers’ scientific epistemological beliefs and goal orientations in 2X2 framework. Scientific epistemological beliefs are domain-specific views of people about nature and acquisition of scientific knowledge, how scientific knowledge is produced, how reliable and valid that knowledge is and how it is shared. Participants were 484 pre-service teachers and 284 (59 %) of them were attending to education faculty and 198 (41 %) of them were graduates who attended teaching certificate program. Scientific epistemological beliefs predicted both mastery (approach-avoidance) and performance (approach-avoidance) goal orientations. The participants who viewed science from a more traditional perspective were more likely to adopt mastery-approach, mastery-avoidance, performance-approach and performance-avoidance goals, respectively. Moreover, the participants who attended and successfully completed a scientific research methods course formerly had less traditional scientific epistemological beliefs than the participants who had not attended to such a course previously. Theoretical and educational implications of the findings were discussed.