Pre-service science teachers’ instructional planning for teaching nature of science: a multiple case study

Current study is a multiple case study exploring three pre-service science teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge for instructional planning regarding nature of science (NOS) teaching. All pre-service science teachers were taught NOS explicitly and expected to integrate their understanding of nature of science into their lesson plans. The analysis of lesson plans showed that participants still had difficulties in both integrating NOS explicitly and selecting appropriate strategies for assessing students’ NOS understanding. The results suggested that efforts to improve pre-service science teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge for teaching NOS should put more emphasis on strategies for assessing NOS and how to integrate NOS explicitly into science content.