Nature of Science (NOS) has garnered a significant amount research in science education. A recent framework on NOS is the so-called "Family Resemblance Approach" (FRA) which presents NOS as a cognitive-epistemic and social-institutional system with a set of categories: aims and values, scientific methods, scientific practices, scientific knowledge and socialinstitutional aspects of science. Although FRA has been problematised philosophically and its implications for science education have been considered by science educators, its empirical adaptations in science education are limited. We present a study based on a funded preservice science teacher education project whose aim was to design, implement and evaluate the impact of a series of sessions using FRA-informed NOS strategies. In order to differentiate the educational adaptations of FRA, we refer to Reconceptualised Family Resemblance Approach to Nature of Science or RFN. A total of 15 female participants from a four-year undergraduate teacher education programme attended in a series of 14-week sessions. A 70-item questionnaire entitled "RFN Questionnaire" was designed to investigate the outcomes of the teacher education intervention relative to the learning goals set for each session that focused on a particular RFN category. Individual interviews with PSTs were also conducted. Quantitative and qualitative data analysis of RFN categories results suggest that the teacher education intervention had an overall significant impact on pre-service teachers' views of NOS. The paper contributes to understanding of how NOS can be incorporated in science teacher education using a new orientation to NOS based on FRA.
The paper presents a study about pre-service science teachers' perceptions of Nature of Science (NOS). Although there is substantial amount of research on NOS in science teacher education, international comparative accounts particularly of in-depth qualitative data emerging from group discussions are fairly minimal. The primary aim of the research was to determine the changes of pre-service science teachers' NOS perceptions following group discussions in two different national contexts: Turkey and England. Two groups of pre-service teachers from Turkey were contrasted with two groups of pre-service teachers from England. The group discussions were structured with a set of steps. In the first step, the participants were asked to reflect about NOS and record their key ideas on sticky notes. Subsequently they were presented with a framework of NOS represented in an image, and they were asked to situate their own ideas from the sticky notes onto this image. Verbal data from group discussions were investigated by qualitative methodology using thematic analysis. The findings suggest that both groups of pre-service teachers initially focused on epistemic-cognitive aspects of NOS but their ideas became more nuanced in providing some examples about social and institutional dimensions of NOS following the introduction of the NOS image. The study contributes to the understanding of how pre-service teachers view NOS and illustrates how NOS can potentially be incorporated in science teacher education.
''Nature of Science (NOS)'' is one of the important research areas in science education. Erduran and Dagher (2014) reconceptualized Irzik and Nola (2014)'s "Family Resemblance Approach (FRA)'' to explain NOS as an epistemic, cognitive and social aspects in a holistic way. Kaya and Erduran (2016a) developed the term RFN (Reconceptualized FRA to NOS) including some educational applications to integrate NOS in science education. This study is a part of a project including 14 weeks application on teaching NOS. The aim of this study is to determine the effect of the teacher education intervention based on RFN to the participants' perceptions. 11 pre-service science and 4 pre-service chemistry teachers participated in the study. The ''NOS Questionnaire'' was developed in order to determine pre-service teachers' pre and post perceptions of RFN categories. Interviews were also conducted before and after the intervention. The findings show that pre-service science teachers' understanding of each RFN category changed and developed.
This study aimed to investigate the interrelationships among high school students’ science and mathematics achievement, attitudes towards STEM and gender. The participants of the study were 446 public high school students (240 females, 206 males) from two cities in Turkey. They were 10th, 11th, and 12th grade level students selected from two different kinds of schools which are Anatolian Religious High School and Anatolian High School. The Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used to determine the relationships among the variables of the study. It was found that mathematics achievement and science achievement are significantly and positively associated with students’ mathematics attitudes, and science attitudes, but negatively related to students’ attitudes towards engineering and technology. On the other hand, 21st-century skills were not found to be significantly associated with both mathematics achievement and science achievement. The results also indicated that female students had higher mathematics and science achievement scores than male students. However, male students had more interest in engineering departments. The results of the study also imply the importance of the indirect effect of attitudes towards STEM on the relationship between students’ achievement and gender.
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