This conference paper was presented at the annual meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching in New Orleans, LA.While reforms emphasize understanding the nature of science (NOS), a challenge
in meeting the vision of the reforms is that teachers lack understandings consistent with
contemporary views of NOS. Though teacher educators have successfully improved
prospective teachers' views of NOS within science methods courses (Akerson et al.,
2000) and specialized science content courses for teachers (Abd-El-Khalick, 2001; Hanuscin, et al., 2004), recent work questions whether such single-course efforts are sufficient to promote retention of improved views (Akerson, et al., 2006). From a conceptual change perspective, we examined the development of preservice elementary teachers' views of NOS across their program of study. Utilizing the VNOS-C (Lederman, et al., 2002), we conducted a pretest posttest for treated and comparison groups of both science content (physics) and pedagogy (methods) courses. 76% of participants who received NOS instruction in their science content course exhibited improved views, while only 14% of participants enrolled in a comparison section did so. Those who later enrolled in a methods course that emphasized NOS retained or further improved their views, while those who enrolled in a methods course in which NOS was not a primary
focus reverted to their original views. Our findings underscore the importance of coherence in NOS instruction throughout teacher education
