Investigation of the relationships between science teachers' epistemological belief systems and their teaching of socioscientific issues

Socioscientific issues are different from many other science topics due to their aforementioned nature and they are hard to teach topics to many science teachers. Many teachers either do not simply teach these topics or organize unplanned discussions. In this sense, it is important to study science teachers' teaching practices about socioscientific issues and the underlying mechanism of these practices. It is well-known that teachers' epistemological beliefs influence teachers' teaching of controversial topics. At this point, the purpose of this research is to investigate the relationships between science teachers' epistemological belief systems and their teaching of socioscientific issues. In this multiple-case study, the naturalistic inquiru perspective was adopted. The sample included three science teachers from Ankara and one from Kirsehir. The interviews and observations were used as data collection tools. These tools are Interview Form (IF) of Demographics, IF of Motivational Beliefs about Teaching, IF of Science Teaching, IF of Constructivist Teaching, IF of Domain-General (general knowledge) Epistemologies, IF of Domain-Specific (scientific knowledge) Epistemologies, IF of General Classroom Teaching, IF of Teaching of Socioscientific Issues and Classroom Discourse Observation Form. Inductive and Deductive codding procedures were adopted. First, deductive codding was used in order to categorize science teachers' domain-general and domain-specific epistemologies as well as their teaching of socioscientific issues. In order to understand the relationships between epistemologies and teaching practices, inductive codding was used. The grounded theory also informed inductive procedures. The results showed that there were close relationships between teaching of socioscientific issues and domain-general as well as domain-specific epistemologies. For example, in the epistemic belief system, those who considered that the knowledge was certain also believed that scientific knowledge was certain. In addition, science teachers possessing sophisticated epistemic belief system taught the socioscientific issues in a way that is consistent with reform expectations, whereas those having naïve epistemic belief system presented socioscientific issues in a way that is inconsistent with reform goals. However, one of the teachers possessing sophisticated epistemologies taught socioscientific issues with an inconsistent approach with the reforms. She expressed that certain cultural factors and old educational philosophies were responsible for the inconsistencies between her teaching of socioscientific issues and epistemologies. At the end of the thesis, certain implementations about the development of teachers' epistemologies and removal of prejudies were suggested. Key Words: Domain-general epistemologies, domain-specific epistemologies, socioscientific issues, science teachers, multiple-case study.