How do pre-service elementary/primary teachers define “criteria of scientificity“ and how to help them building these criteria?

The definition of "criteria of scientificity” has been debated forever. What is Science? How do we distinguish Science from what it is not? These questions have been widely explored.
The scientific community of Science is marked by specific language practices, reflected by the knowledge produced (Lhoste, 2008). In order to foster our students’ understanding of how scientific knowledge is built and to develop their critical thinking abilities, it is important that their teachers train them to distinguish among these discursive registers. A large number of primary and secondary students face difficulties in identifying whether a theory is scientific or not (Carette et al., 2013).
These difficulties may be rooted in teachers' teaching practices (Carette et al., 2013), reflecting their epistemic conceptions and beliefs about the nature of science and the scientific process (Lakin and Wellington, 1994, Noverraz et al, 2007), and frequently constitute barriers to professional development (Porlán et al., 1998). To address this problem, it is important that teacher training:
- leads to question their personal perceptions about the nature of science;
- builds the specificities related to the production of scientific discourse;
- effectively equips them to set up didactic devices enabling students to recognize the criteria of scientificity.
The instructional design presented in this communication was set up with 1st year preservice primary teachers enrolled in the Haute Ecole de la Ville de Liège. Its goal is to teach preservice teachers to discern criteria of scientificity. The 3 months intervention consisted in the production of intermediate writings, in reading informative texts and watching videos to assess the scientificity with the support of tools. Evidence of representations about criteria of scientificity and teaching sciences were collected at the beginning and at the end of the intervention.
The results show that preservice teachers’ conceptions have perceptibly evolved.