New Perspectives in Science Education

This study is about a large-scale teacher professional development project aimed at supporting middle school in-service science teachers’ nature of science (NOS) views, beliefs, and practices. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of a large-scale continuing professional development (CPD) program designed to improve teachers’ NOS views, beliefs, and practices. In this project, a CPD program was implemented for a year with voluntary attendance of 18 middle school science teachers and their students. The intervention process with the science teachers consisted of ten monthly meetings, each lasting about 8 hours, over two semesters. In this process teachers were introduced in a collaborative and reflective environment to various NOS aspects and ways of using explicit instruction and formative assessment in their NOS teaching. Also, the teaching activities and materials were provided to teachers to be implemented in their classrooms for one year. Data were collected and evaluated based on ‘five level evaluation model' developed by adding another level to Kirkpatrick’s (2001) four-level evaluation model. These levels are reaction, learning, beliefs, transfer and results. In the current study, teacher reactions about CPD program were collected making interviews at the end of the study by using five open-ended questions and analyzed by using content analysis. Teachers’ learning about NOS was assessed by pre-post semi-structured interviews using VNOS-C (Abd-El-Khalick, 1998) and analyzed by using content analysis. Teachers' views were classified into three categories as ‘naive’, ‘eclectic’ and ‘informed’. Teachers’ beliefs about teaching and learning NOS were measured by using two likert-type scales (Self-Efficacy Beliefs Towards Teaching NOS Scale and BARSTL) as pre-post tests. Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test (2-tailed) was used to compare the results. Improvement of teachers’ practices about NOS was assessed capturing videos during their classroom practices. Data analyzed by using content analysis. Lastly, students’ NOS views were assesed by using VNOS-D (Lederman & Khishfe, 2002) as pre-mid-post tests. The data was classified as ‘naive-1’, ‘eclectic-2’ and ‘informed-3’. Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test (2-tailed) was used to compare the results. The findings obtained from the project demonstrate that the CPD program was effective to improve teachers’ views about NOS, beliefs about teaching and learning NOS and classroom practices about NOS.