Investigation of the preservice science teachers? pedagogical content knowledge about the nature of science

The aim of this study is to investigate the situation of pre-service science teachers? pedagogical content knowledge about the nature of science. Study is being carried out by using ?Holistic Multiple Case Design? that enables all individually and comparative evaluation of different conditions of qualitative research methodology. Population of research chosen from 89 pre-service science teachers in 2009-2010 academic year at Gazi University Primary Education Division of Science Education Teaching Department by the maximum variety sampling of the purposive sampling methods that was executed with five pre-service teachers. Pre-service teachers? content knowledge about nature of science was identified with ?Views about the Nature of Science (VANS) Questionnaire?, ?VNOS-C Questionnaire? and semi-structure questionnaire parallel to data obtained through individual interviews. Also, the triangulation was used for determining the pre-service teachers? pedagogical content knowledge about nature of science.The data obtained from research was analyzed with descriptive and content analysis methods. HyperRESEARCHTM 2.8.3. Analysis Program was used in the content analysis.As a result of analysis, pre-service teachers? in the context of the knowledge relating to content knowledge of the nature of science; the knowledge of nature of observations, hypotheses, theories, theories and laws in the naive level; some of the other dimensions of nature of science it has been identified that they are in the realistic levels such as the knowledge of definition of the scientific, the knowledge of characteristics of the scientists, the information of the nature of the classification scheme. But it has been identified that there is no relationship between the components of the nature of science knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge about the nature of science that the pre-service teachers have. In addition to this, in general the interviews about pedagogical knowledge and the classroom practices of the pre-service teachers differ from each other. Furthermore, there are also differences between the class applications and opinions of the pre-service teachers about the pedagogical knowledge and in general, it is determined that inadequency of the pre-service teachers about teaching the nature of science caused especially by the weakness of their self-efficacy beliefs.Key Words: Nature of Science, Pedagogical Content Knowledge, Preservice Science Teachers