The purpose of this study was to assess preservice teachers' views of Nature of Science (NOS), identify aspects that were challenging for conceptual change, and explore reasons why. This study particularly focused on why and how some concepts of NOS may be more easily altered than others. Fourteen preservice science teachers enrolled in a NOS and…

This study questions the presumed relation between formal schooling and scientific literacy about biotechnologies. Comparing science and nonscience majors' knowledge of and attitudes toward biotechnological applications, conclusions are drawn if their formal learnings improve pupils' understandings of and attitudes toward biotechnology…

Chemistry lesson should be supported with experiments to understand the lecture effectively. For safety laboratory environment and to prevent laboratory accidents; chemical substances' properties, working principles for chemical substances' usage should be learnt. Aim of the present study was to analyze the effect of experiments which depend on…

Findings of this study suggest that scientific argumentation can play an effective role in addressing complex socioscientific issues (i.e. global climate change). This research examined changes in preservice teachers' knowledge and perceptions about climate change in an innovative undergraduate-level elementary science methods course. The…

The primary purpose of this study was to explore not only the effects of epistemic beliefs in science on science-text reading but also the gender differences in epistemic beliefs and the reading process. The interactions between gender and epistemic beliefs during reading were also explored. A total of 25 university students, 13 male and 12…

Developing students' positive attitude toward learning is one of the important things, because some researchers mention that attitudes toward the subjects are related to academic achievement. Teachers, in the implementation of learning can evaluate attitudes toward the subjects, in order to know how students' attitude toward learning that is/has…

Girls performing well in mathematics at school do not necessarily enrol for mathematics courses at South African universities. Teachers could be transferring beliefs about the nature of mathematics favouring boys. This paper compared male and female pre-service teachers' beliefs about the nature of mathematics. A quantitative, descriptive research…

This study investigated the conceptions of the nature of science held by pre-service undergraduate biology teachers in South-West, Nigeria. Specifically, the study examined the influence of their gender on their conceptions of the nature of science. The study was a descriptive research of the survey method. The population for the study comprised…

Student feelings towards the laboratory component of an introductory chemistry unit were evaluated in an action research study, over a three-year period at the University of Western Australia. In 2013 we found that the percentage of students with negative feelings towards the laboratory increased over the duration of a semester. In 2014 we…

The aim of this study is to investigate the views of pre-service science teachers on Science-Technology-Society (STS). In the research, a descriptive research method was used and data were collected using the Views on Science-Technology-Society (VOSTS) Questionnaire. In general, the results of this study revealed that pre-service science teachers…

This article reports on student preschool teachers' views of science and its role in preschool. Three cohorts of students have been given a written questionnaire with open-ended questions before and after a one-semester course including science (specifically Chemistry and Physics) in a 3.5-year preschool teacher programme in Sweden. The science…

A positive attitude to a subject may be congruent with higher achievement; however, limited evidence supports this for students in undergraduate chemistry--this may result from difficulties in quantifying attitude. Therefore, in this study, the Attitude to the Study of Chemistry Inventory (ASCI)--a validated instrument to quantify attitude, was…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of explicit-reflective nature of science (NOS) instruction on Turkish prospective chemistry teachers' (PCTs) views of NOS. In the research, case study as a qualitative design was used and PCTs' views were examined thoroughly. The participants of the study consisted of 22 senior PCTs. Data…

The purpose of this study was to explore how Korean preservice elementary teachers' beliefs about nature of science (NOS) and their beliefs about constructivist teaching were structured and related and if any relation was prevalent in the content-specific contexts. As the same format, three versions of questionnaires were developed in three…

A "citizen science" outreach program was aimed at high school students in Western Australia with a focus on agricultural sciences. The program had two main objectives: the collection of samples and the mapping of the distribution of the leaf disease powdery mildew of barley across the state; and support for the teaching and learning of…