Improving science and mathematics pre-service teachers' conseptions of nature of science

Educational programs are put criteria for grow up well-qualified people who knows Nature of Science and who are good scientific-literated people. Accordingly, in every discipline related with science has contributions to people who has these specialities. On the other hand, people?s learnings at different areas has an important role in permanency of their learning in education. For that reason, science education should not be teached only for a specific discipline, it should be teached interacted with other disciplines. Science and math lessons are two important lessons that are taken this mission. However, lots of people knows that mathematics has a crucial step in development of science; they constitute a structure in their minds about Nature of Science without thinking mathematics. This situation shows the importance of teachers? consciousness of this reality and their post-positivist views of Nature of Science that these teachers play an important role to grow up scientific-literated people.In this study, it is aimed to explore whether differences exist between science and mathematics teachers? views about NOS or not. Beside this, it is tried to find out similar and different point of views to see the effect of used method. A total of seventy-five pre-service elementary teachers (32science-43math) participated in this study. Participants from both two groups were engaged in different NOS activities that explicit reflective approach to improve their views through one school semester. According to this, Views of Nature of Science (VNOS-C) questionnaire (Lederman, Scharwartz, Abd-El-Khalick, and Bell, 2002) was used as a pre-test to determine participants? initial views of NOS, and it was also administered at the end of the semester as a post test to determine changes in participants? views. Semi-structured interview was undertaken with 8 participants as post tests in order to help uncover the participants? views. Each of the participants? pre and post survey? responses were analyzed by a coding system which has three-category coding scheme ?naïve?, ?have merit? and ?informed?.The results indicate that, there is a positive change at the pre-service teachers? views about the inspected aspects of NOS. According to most of the aspects of NOS which are science, tentativeness, subjectivity, social and cultural embeddedness and creativity; science and math pre-service teachers are more informed after the instruction than before it. The pre-service science teachers are more informed about the NOS aspects that are epistemology of theories and laws and scientific method than pre-service mathematics teachers. The results of the study clearly revealed that the activities that are instructed with explicit reflective approach play a positive role to improve the teachers? learning of concepts about NOS from different disciplines.Keywords: Nature of science, Pre-service Science Teachers, Pre-service Mathematics Teachers