Examining science teacher’s understandings of the NOS aspects through the use of knowledge test and open-ended questions

The nature of science aspects (NOS) are the most emphasized theme inmany curriculum and reform attempts. Teachers as a curriculumimplementer in the classroom play important role for policy, arrangementsand classroom experiences on NOS understandings of students. Researchersgenerally assessed the teachers’ NOS conceptions using open-endedquestions plus interview in limited samples. However, in the literature, therehave been some critics on this way of assessment. For that reason, this studyaims to assess elementary science teachers’ (N=47) NOS conceptions byusing “Open-ended questions” and “Knowledge test”. The results showedexistence of some misunderstandings on NOS and the participants’responses to knowledge test and open-ended questions gave similar patternin terms of ten aspects of NOS, except for three aspects.