An Exploration Of The Variety Of Primary School Science Teachers' VNOS And Teacher Training

Improving public scientific literacy has been widely acknowledged as one of the educational goals in most countries.As the important component of scientific literacy,nature of science(NOS)has been paid much attention to during education reforms.Chinese elementary education reform has clearly required that science education should gradually equip students with adequate views on nature of science(VNOS).In science classes,teachers' VONS can affect students' VNOS through teaching behaviors.So it is important to make a research on the status quo of science teachers'VNOS and find out how to improve the level of the VNOS by training programs.In addition,the formation of VNOS is related to the cultural background.It is meaningful to choose Chinese science teachers as participants.A total of 2005 Chinese primary school science teachers were examined in the survey of this study in 2013.The content of the questionnaires used in this survey has four parts.Part one is about the demographic information of the participants.Part two is about the ability to apply knowledge of NOS in daily life which is a latent variable in this study.Part three is about VNOS which consists both of the classic and the modern VNOS sub-scales.Part four is about the ability of the teachers to apply VNOS in classroom teaching.After the primary descriptive analysis of the socio-demographic characteristics of the participants,the Cluster Analysis was used according to the participants' combinative characteristics of their classic and modern VNOS.In the subsequent step,Chi-square tests as well as the Contingency coefficient were performed in order to analyze the differences of the teachers' socio-demographic characteristics among the groups.Finally,MANOVA was conducted to reveal group disparities in their abilities to apply the knowledge of NOS in daily life and in classroom teaching-There are four main findings as below:a.The participants were classified into four groups:the ambiguous VNOS group(AG),the post-modernist VNOS group(PG),the classic VNOS group(CG)and the modern VNOS group(MG).There are significant differences among four groups in terms of training time,title rank and teachers' ability to apply NOS knowledge in daily life and in classroom teaching.The ambiguous VNOS and the post-modernist VNOS are the inadequate VNOS,while the classic VNOS and the modern VNOS are the developing and adequate VNOS.b.There are two kinds of path of the development of Chinese primary school science teachers.One is a normal development process which conformed to the history of science,namely,from AG to CG to MG.The other contains an outlier in the trend which is a consequence of the integrated impact from the post-modern ideas and the Chinese traditions.c.Modern views on nature of science cannot be used as only standard when evaluating teachers' VNOS,because the classic concepts are the important prerequisite.d.Existing training programs in China are only suitable for some teachers.For the other teachers,these training programs might make no sense or even have negative influence.In order to equip science teachers with adequate VNOS,there are following suggestions:a.Multi-levels training programs can be conducted according to different kind of teachers' VNOS.For teachers of both Ambiguous Group and Post-modernist Group,the training courses should start from the basic step delivering classic concepts,For the teachers of Classic Group,they can be equipped with modern views on nature of science.b.Chinese science teacher's training program should be in accordance with the successive order of the history of science,and the content of the program should start from the classic conception,and then progressively promoting up to the modern version.The "step over development" mode would not be effective in China.