A study toward teaching the nature of science to pre-service teachers

Abstract

This study investigated the influence of the nature of science teaching activities, based on explicit-reflective inquiry oriented approach on pre-service teachers’ nature of science concepts. This study is interpretive in nature because it focused on the meanings that participant ascribed to the emphasize aspects of nature of science. Twelve teaching activities based on the empirical, tentative, inferential, creative and imaginative, subjective, socially and culturally and relationships between scientific theories and laws nature of scientific knowledge were designed and implemented to a group of 36 pre-service teachers. Study was implemented in Science Teaching Laboratory Application-I lesson. In lesson, participants determined a problem case and studied on this problem like a scientist. Besides, explicit-reflective teaching activities were implemented to participants. After each of activity, pre-service teachers wrote reflective notes. Data was gathered by a pre-post “nature of science questionnaire”, semi structured interviews, and also reflective notes for each of the activity by participants. Each pre-service teachers’ pre and post nature of science profiles were constructed and compared, thus, effect of the activities on the participants was determined. While participants’ profiles were constructed, the data by categorizing each participants’ views of the seven emphasized aspects of NOS into “adequate”, “variable” and “poor”. In order to learn about the effects of the explicit-reflective nature of science teaching activities on views on scientific knowledge, paired t test was used. From the data, it was concluded that pre-service teachers had uncertain views about the nature of science at the beginning, however after the intervention; pre-service teachers had very informed views about it. Especially, there was a significant change in pre-service teachers’ views on four aspects of the nature of science; tentative, relationships between scientific theories and laws, creative of scientific knowledge and inference of nature of science. It is suggested that developing informed conceptions of the nature of science for pre-service teachers is a cognitive instructional outcome that requires an explicitreflective instructional approach.