Blending Problem Based Learning and History of Science Approaches to Enhance Views about Scientific Inquiry: New Wine in an Old Bottle

Abstract

In 2016, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) showed that approximately 44.4% of students in Turkey obtained very low grades when their scientific knowledge was evaluated. In addition, the vast majority of students were shown to have no knowledge of basic scientific terms or concepts. Science teachers play a significant role in facilitating students’ understanding of science, conceptions of scientific inquiry (SI) and the nature of science (NOS), and the transfer of those conceptions into classroom practice. Therefore, in this paper, I present my experiences of blending problem-based learning (PBL) and the history of science (HOS) with technological approaches. The study aimed to determine the effectiveness of this innovative approach in improving pre-service science teachers’ SI views. The Views about Scientific Inquiry (VASI) questionnaire was used as a data collection tool (Lederman et al., 2014). The findings showed that most of the views of pre-service science teachers improved for all SI items except “Consistent with data collected.” The results also indicated that the teachers that used these approaches were able to overcome initial barriers in preparing lesson plans for teaching science and SI.