Supporting the teachers' professional developments though the process about teaching NOS: A continuing professional development program model

Nature of science (NOS) is an important component of scientific literacy that is one of the main goals of science education programs. One of the main actors in promoting learning about NOS is science teachers. To achieve the vision of scientific literacy described in the reform documents, teachers should demonstrate both informed views of NOS and the ability to translate their understandings into science instruction. Because of this, supporting teachers' professional development in this field is crucial. Therefore, in current study; developing a continuing professional development (CPD) program model that is effective and suitable for the training of in-service science teachers in Turkey was aimed, by evaluating effectiveness of a CPD programabout NOS and determining if there is a lack, or aspects to be improved of this program. For this purpose a CPD program was implemented as a part of a large-scale teacher professional development project is titled "Continuing Teacher Professional Development to Support the Teaching about Nature of Science" (BIDOMEG) for a year with voluntary attendance of 18 middle school science teachers and their students. At the intervention process, content-based and curriculum related teaching activities and materials were provided to the science teachers to be implemented in their classrooms for one year. Also, at the workshops, teacher were introduced to various NOS aspects and ways of using effective teaching strategies in their NOS teaching. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used at collecting and analyzing data about research problems. Data about teachers' NOS views was assessed by pre-post semi-structured interviews using VNOS-C (Abd-El Khalick, 1998), datas about teachers' NOS teaching and learning beliefs were assessed by using two likert-type scales (Self-Efficacy Beliefs Towards Teaching NOS Scale developed by researchers and BARSTL (Sampson and Benton, 2006)) as pre-post tests, data about improvement of teachers' classroom practices was assessed capturing videos during their classroom practices, data about how this improvement reflected to the students' learning outcomes was assesed by using VNOS-D (Lederman and Khishfe, 2002) as pre-mid-post tests, lastly teachers' views about implemented CPD program were assessed by using 'Program Evaluating Form' developed by researchers at the end of the research. Data collected by videos and VNOS-D was analyzed by other research groups of BIDOMEG project, and some of this data was used to support the findings of the research. The findings obtained from the project demonstrate that the CPD program improved teachers' views about NOS, beliefs about teaching and learning NOS and classroom practices about NOS. Research findings also demonstrate that these improvements positively reflected to the students' outcomes about NOS. It was also revealed that teachers generally expressed positive opinions about the CPD program. Based on the light of these findings and the literature, several suggessions has been presented about how it should be of an in-service teacher professional development programs that will be developed.