Science education

Tracing the contemporary assumptions about NOS, NOT and NOL and their implication in science teachers’ professional development

For us professional development of science teachers goes beyond the term 'training' with its implications of learning skills, and encompasses training strategies of helping teachers not only learn new skills but also develop new insights in pedagogy and in their own practice.

We regard that teaching practice has many dimensions, five of the most important of them are (Bartholomew Osborne & Ratcliffe 2004):

• Teachers knowledge and understanding of the nature of science
• Teacher’s conceptions of their own role
• Teachers’ use of discourse
• Teachers’ views of learning goals
• Teachers’ views about the nature of classroom activities

All these dimensions have to do explicitly or implicitly with three basic aspects of science education namely NOS, NOL, and NOT. A contemporary teacher professional development program should be based and stress the contemporary assumptions about these three aspects.

In the context of “The MAP prOject” we made a research in the four countries, using as research instrument a questionnaire, in order to investigate science teachers' views about NOS, NOT, NOL, and about issues that concern the fall of bodies. Our aim was to elicit science teachers’ knowledge and views relative to history of science, to science education and their scientific knowledge about the theory of the gravitational force, to analyze science teachers needs and to search thoroughly the international contemporary science education literature, in order to established the basis for the optimum development of the training curriculum which was the culminating goal of “The MAP prOject”.

The results of research are presented in an extended paper referring to the conclusions and the implications of the study for teacher development and the in-service training program of “The MAP project”.