Investigating the development of pre-service science teachers’ NOSI views and related teaching practices^*

* This paper was presented at International Conference of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST), Atlanta, GA, USA. March 10–13, 2018.

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to examine how pre-service science teachers develop their understandings of nature of scientific inquiry during the science laboratory course with preparing 5E based lesson plans, and how they transfer those understandings into their teaching practices. All data were collected and analysed qualitatively by using the case study approach. Thirty-four pre-service teachers (25 females, 9 males) participated in this study. Data were collected via the five sources: The Views About Scientific Inquiry questionnaire, inquiry-based 5E lesson plan, classroom observations, video recordings, and semi-structured interviews. The results showed that some aspects of nature of scientific inquiry were positively changed (e.g. ‘multiple scientific methods’) while some aspects were not altered significantly (e.g. ‘same procedures may not get the same results’). This study, also, showed that pre-service science teachers could partly transfer their understanding of nature of scientific inquiry into their teaching practices for some reasons, including participants’ subject matter knowledge, motivations, practicing skills, and personal characteristics. This study suggests that science teachers should be more aware of the importance of nature of scientific inquiry, and they should be given more opportunity to experience of preparation and teaching of scientific inquiry.

KEYWORDS:

• Inquiry-based teaching
• nature of scientific inquiry
• 5E lesson planning
• pre-service science teachers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Günkut Mesci http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0319-5993

Seda Çavuş-Güngören http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9521-0008

Funda Yesildag-Hasancebi http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9365-940X

Notes

* This paper was presented at International Conference of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST), Atlanta, GA, USA. March 10–13, 2018.