The South African pre-service teacher’s physics pedagogical orientations.

To come up with ways on how teacher training institutions should train pre-service teachers is one of the most discussed topics among teacher educators and researchers. Some of the reasons for this change is to integrate new teaching methods such as inquiry-based learning and problem-solving instructions to mention few. However, it is discovered that most universities provide students with limited exposer to different methods of teaching science. The current study investigates physical science pre-service teacher’s physics pedagogical orientations when they are at university. The phrase orientation denotes teachers’ knowledge and beliefs for teaching science. Pedagogical orientations are classified into four approaches; direct didactic, direct active, guided inquiry and open discovery. To establish the physical sciences pre-service teacher’s physics pedagogical preferences, we used an instrument comprising of five items that portrayed an actual teaching scenario for a physical sciences topic. Each item had four teaching alternative methods and respondents were requested to select the most appropriate choice. A quantitative method was used to obtain teachers pedagogical orientations. The findings indicate that students preferred the direct approach aligned with the direct active, while a smaller group preferred learner-centred orientation.