Abstract:

Scientific literacy has been stated as perennial goal of science education. Nature of Science (NOS) has been indispensable component of scientific literacy. Thus having students with desired understanding of NOS is one of the main attainments to achieve scientific literacy. Even though nature of science (NOS) has been claimed as an important learning outcome for science education, research studies have consistently shown that both students and teachers have naïve ideas of nature of scientific knowledge. (Abd-El Khalick & Lederman, 2000; Dogan & Abd-El-Khalick, 2008). These naïve views of both students and teachers were more likely to be product of engagement science focusing on facts rather than role of scientists’ values and assumptions in development of scientific knowledge in their science education life.(Bell, 2004). Additionally, teachers naive ideas on NOS kept them emphasizing NOS explicitly and reflectively resulting in students with nave NOS views. Therefore, teachers with inadequate understanding of NOS cannot be expected to help their students gain desired understanding of science (Abd-El-Khalick, 2000).Thus it is crucial that pre-service and in-service science teachers should have conceptions aligned with contemporary views on NOS. However, research has revealed that adequate understanding of NOS does not guarantee translation of these concepts into instructional practices (Bell, Matkins & Gansneder, 2011; Abd-El-Khalick & Lederman, 2000). Therefore, in addition to having appropriate understanding of NOS, teachers also should possess necessary skill to translate this knowledge into their instructional practices which requires ability to either adapt or design NOS integrated science lessons. Nevertheless, teachers are not experienced in designing and teaching NOS integrated science lessons effectively (Bell, Matkins, & Gansneder, 2011). Therefore, first of all, we should help pre-service teachers gain the necessary knowledge and practice of adapting and designing NOS lessons.
Current study is a multiple case study exploring seven pre service science teachers’ development of NOS views and instructional planning regarding NOS over a science method course. All pre service science teachers were taught NOS explicitly before, so they were supposed to integrate their understanding of NOS into their lesson plans. They were supposed to write five lesson plans each including NOS objectives, integration of NOS and evaluation of NOS parts and each lesson plan were given feedback by the instructor for giving opportunities them to improve their rest of the lesson plans.Data were collected by means of pre-post administration of VNOS-C questionnaire to seek for change in their understanding over science method course. Leson plans were analyzed to investigate their NOS instructional planning. Analysis of VNOS-C showed that most of the participants held misconceptions about most of the aspects of NOS at the outset of the science method course. However, all participants achieved more informed understanding of NOS over the course. Concerning, planning to teach NOS, participant achieved explicit relfective NOS planning mostly for empirical, subjetive and tentative NOS, even though they achieved desired understanding of other NOS aspects. The detailed description of results will be provided in longer abstract. Results of the research might inform scientific community on needs on pre service science teachers regarding their NOS teaching.

Keywords:

Nature of science, teacher education.