Abstract:

The purposes of our study are (a) to investigate how a popular game could be used for evaluating and enhancing views of prospective chemistry teachers about Nature of Science (NOS), (b) to examine prospective chemistry teachers’ reflections on NOS aspects as learners and on this evaluation activity as teachers. This study is a part of an ongoing project supported by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK, project number: 108K086) trying to design original teacher development packages and workshops with the final goal of improving elementary and secondary school students’ understanding of the NOS.

Recent studies show that most science teachers do not receive any formal instruction in the nature of science when they were in schools or colleges. To overcome these problems in science education, various strategies have been proposed to enhance prospective teachers’ view of the nature of science. Games are one the strategies which can be employed in classrooms. Games inherited some motivational constructs like fun, winning, loosing and social interaction. In this study, a popular game was proposed as an innovative tool to explicitly teach NOS in science classes.

27 (11 male and 16 female) prospective chemistry teachers attending their last year in a five-year Teacher Education Program at a public university in Turkey were selected with purposeful sampling method in this case study. This study focuses on how NOS views could be evaluated interactively and enjoyably through a game setting. This game named Nature of Science Taboo (NOST) was developed by the researchers inspired from the popular game “Taboo”. Eight NOST cards were prepared. Each NOST card contained a NOS aspect, taboo words, explanation method and sample cases (e.g. historical case, anecdote or current issues) written on them. Just like the Taboo game, within each group, half of the group tried to explain one of the NOS aspects on the card without using some taboo science concepts and the other half tried to guess this NOS aspect. The one half of the group was supposed to select either “role playing” or “drawing” options to explain the NOS aspect. In a given amount of time, the other half of the group was supposed to guess the aspect. After the game finished, prospective teachers were asked to write a reflection paper on the NOS aspects they tried to explain in this game and another reflection paper on this interactive game indicating whether they could use this game to let their students gain a better understanding of NOS. In addition to that, they filled a match item test including the NOS aspects and selected historical cases from the card.

Data sources for this study were observations involving field notes and video records, match item test and reflection papers. Analysis of data revealed that this interactive game activity (NOST) was helpful to enhance and evaluate students’ views on NOS aspects they learned throughout the course. Also, this game created a context through which the content of the NOS course were summarized.

Keywords:

Nature of Science, Teacher Education, Science Teaching, Games.