The purpose of this study was to explore the understandings of prospective early childhood teachers on scientific knowledge and scientific method. The study was interpretive in nature. The data were collected through various open-ended questions with subsequent auxiliary ones directed towards ten participants during a combination of in-depth focus group interviews and getting peer feedbacks in this process. Conversations and discussions among the participants were tracked on a tape recorder during the sessions and translated verbatim. The study focused on convenience and criterion sampling. As a criterion, academic achievement (accumulated GDA's) was considered, and the participants were assigned to the final sample this way. The data were analyzed in accordance with the conceptual framework of Marshall and Rossman [1] using an analytical task of qualitative approach. All data that were described, categorized and related to each other in the analysis are given in categories as well as emergent codes. Views of the participants were related to each other in an interpretive manner. Based on the results, the implications and the directions for further study are discussed.

The fulfillment of meaningful learning in the course of teaching process depends upon students' achievement in associating scientific conceptions with the facts they encounter in their daily lives. In science courses, students are generally unable to understand the meanings of the concepts accurately due to the unavailability of using practical examples from daily life in the school settings. In science education, particularly in conceptual learning, the association of the conceptions with daily lives needs to be paid more attention by both teachers and students. Research provides evidence on students' tendency to memorize rather learning meaningfully. The purpose of this study is to investigate to what extent students associate the conceptions included in the unit of "Water Chemistry and Water Treatment" with the facts encountered in the daily basis. The study was conducted in accordance with survey method. To collect more interpretive data, students were exposed to open-ended questions located in a standard form. These questions were designed in accordance with certain facts and circumstances related to water chemistry and water treatment and students were expected to give scientific explanations of the conceptions appropriate for the prevailing content of science teaching curriculum. The responses collected by the forms were categorized considering categorizations already exist in the related literature. According to the results, it is concluded that students are not fully capable of associating the conceptions with their daily lives.

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The efforts shown in recent years related to the reform movements in science education have focused on the assertion that informed nature of science understandings (NOS, hereafter) should be developed. In line with this idea, NOS has become the central component of numerous science curricula. In the study, therefore, it was aimed to determine science education master students’ NOS understandings. The study was conducted in a state university in Turkey during the fall semester of the 2019-2020 academic year and included six science education master students who had taken science methods course. The data were collected through interviews and analyzed by content analysis under phenomenological method. As a result, the students had various and mixed understandings related to the definition of science and characteristics of scientific knowledge. In addition, it was observed that the students handled science with a narrow scope, that they had difficulty in the distinction between theory and law, and that they could not develop informed understandings in the component of theory-laden NOS. In light of these results, the implications and the directions for further study were provided.

Metacognition is an invaluable agent in ethical decision-making process. This is because it gives individuals the opportunity to switch gears through the monitoring and control of thinking in solving complex ethical dilemmas. It can be said that the importance of studies evaluating the decision-making process from a moral point of view increases considering the necessity of taking a huge number of decisions in today's complex world. However, studies that measure metacognition as a domain-specific capacity are rarely encountered. The purpose of the present study, then, was to adapt the moral metacognition scale developed in English by McMahon and Good (2016) into Turkish language and to evaluate dimensionality of the scale. The study participants consisted of 302 prospective teachers. This study is a scale adaptation study performed in line with the survey method. The psychometric properties of the instrument have been established by the use of confirmatory factor analysis. Cronbach's alpha coefficient was used to determine the internal consistency of each of the confirmed factors. Data collected from the sample were tested for sampling adequacy. KMO value was found .85 as meritorious and Bartlett test that examines homogeneity of variances was significant. To validate the scale, we ran a four-factor confirmatory factor analysis using chi-square statistic (χ2/df = 1.33; RMSEA=0.045; SRMR=0.063; RMR=0.059; CFI=0.97; GFI=0,89).Given these values, it was seen that scale's hypothesized measurement model with four factors was consistent with actual data yielding good fit indices. In addition, the overall internal reliability of the scale was found to be .87 and .75, .72, .56, .74 for the dimensions in the scale, respectively. The results showed that the scale met the validity and reliability. In conclusion, Turkish version of the moral metacognition scale provided a valid and reliable measure of moral metacognition across preservice teachers.