Science teacher's professional development program's impact on the classroom practice of the nature of science

The studies about classroom practices in NOS-PD contexts are considered scarce to detect the problems caused by curriculum, textbook, teacher, classroom environment, cultural differences and therefore more studies in different cultural contexts are needed in this area. Thus, within this study's design, science teachers' classroom practices about NOS were tracked by the video records and the impact of a longitudinal professional development on their classroom practices was investigated. The research questions are; What is the impact of a professional development program on teachers' classroom practices? and To what extent and how do teachers views about nature of science affect their practices in classroom? 14 science teachers (8 female, 5 male) participated the study, which was a part of a large professional development project that lasted for thirty months. These teachers were working in the same city, however in different schools. It was also confirmed that 10 of those 14 teachers (6 female, 4 male) took History of Science, Philosophy of Science or Nature of Science course or training at least once. The intervention process of science teachers, consisted of totally ten monthly meetings, each lasted about 8 hours were conducted during two semesters for assisting teachers to learn about NOS, explicit-reflective instruction, formative assessment. Further, the teachers were provided with the teaching activities and materials, to be implemented in their classrooms for one year, coherent with specific science content and NOS tenets integrated within. Regarding to the sufficiency of such activities in the national curriculum, the activities coherent with the aforementioned approaches were developed by the project team in collaboration with the participant teachers. Data collection process took one year as well as the intervention process of teachers. The classroom practices of teachers, which were the implementation of developed projects' activities, were recorded. 39 video records were obtained in total; however 2 of those could not be analyzed due to technical problems. The video records were transcribed and analyzed by qualitative software adhering to assessment protocol's criteria, and then the models were retrieved from the software. The notable results were obtained about teachers' transferring NOS views into their instructions. As mentioned above, some teachers with inadequate views of NOS translated better into classroom practices than the ones who had adequate views. Moreover, in contrast to literature it was also detected that the teachers who implemented more number of activities in their instructions were successfully integrated science concepts with NOS concepts. Keywords: Professional development program, Nature of science, Pedagogical Content Knowledge