Impact of a professional development program on 5th, 6th and 7th grade students' views of nature of science

The aim of professional development (PD) programs is to improve teachers' pedagogical content knowledge and effectiveness of their classroom practices. Moreover, the aim of PD programs about Nature of Science (NOS) is to support teachers in integrating the content and NOS tenets into classroom practices. Literature review shows that the studies generally focus on the achievement and efficiency of teachers following such PD programs. However, the studies about the attained pedagogical content knowledge and its reflection on classroom practices and the impact of PD programs on indirect beneficiaries, namely students, are very limited. Therefore, more studies are needed to be conducted in this area. Thus, the purpose of this study is to survey the changes of 5th, 6th and 7th grade students' views of NOS by providing a large scale PD program, called BİDOMEG project, to their teachers, in other words, to determine the impact of longitudinal training program on middle schools students' views of NOS. In this study, 10 (4 female, 6 male) science teachers' and 613 students' data and the changes in their views were analyzed. During the PD program, science teachers attended several NOS training courses and were provided teaching activities and materials with NOS tenets integrated into the curriculum, to be implemented in their classrooms for one year. VNOS-D Questionnaire (Lederman ve Khishfe, 2002) was administrated to 5th, 6th and 7th graders three times as pre, middle and post test and VNOS-C (Abd-El-Khalick, Bell ve Schwartz, 2002) was administrated to science teachers twice as pre and post during the program. The data was classified as naive-1, eclectic-2 and informed-3. The students' data was analyzed quantitatively by the researcher while the teachers' data was analyzed qualitatively by another research group of BİDOMEG project. Results showed that the students' views changed positively at the end of the PD program; however, there was a difference in the developmetn of NOS tenets amon the grades of the students. For the impact of teachers on the students' view, the results also showed that, when the teachers' views on NOS changed positively, the studetns' view might change positively, accordingly. Likewise, teachers' experience year and academic degree had positive effects on students' views on NOS. Finally, recommendations are made for professional development planners and policy makers. Keywords: Professional development program, Nature of science, Middle school students