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Asia-Pacific Forum
on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 9, Issue 2, Article 8
(Dec., 2008)
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The pre-service teachers who participated in the study were enrolled in the Science Instruction II course. The course has four sessions in a week and each session takes 50-minutes. One lecturer and two assistants conduct the course. In the course, theoretical subjects and their applications are separated as two-session periods. In the course, basic techniques such as concept mapping, mind maps and brainstorming are introduced for two sessions in each week and they are applied in the other two sessions in the same week. In addition to these techniques, teaching approaches in science education are introduced and applied. One of these approaches is PBL. In the course, the approaches take more time than the techniques due to their more comprehensive natures. In the course, the students might study individually or as a group, considering the aim of the course subjects. For the evaluation, the outcomes are considered as two different things, as outcomes for the theoretical part and the application part. Theoretical outcomes are assessed by paper and pencil tests whereas the applications are assessed by collecting products such as a portfolio, presentation rating, etc. The target population of the study enrols in the basic science courses such as biology, chemistry and physics out of science instruction courses. The type, content and number of the courses taken by the pre-service elementary teachers are the same for all of the pre-service teachers in Turkey.
