Visions of senior pre-service chemistry teachers on the nature of science

The idea of Science as a neutral knowledge, rational, constructed inductively from objective experiments has been criticized since the beginning of the twentieth century. In this investigative context, several researchers have considered Science as formed by a diversity of aspects, such as its empirical nature, creative, guided by prior conceptions, influenced by and influencer of society, etc. Some understandings of senior pre-service Chemistry teachers about the Nature of Science are presented. The data was obtained from the Views of Nature of Science questionnaire, in its form C (VNOS-C)and individual interviews, conducted with the pre-service teachers to analyze their responses, in light of the aspects of the Nature of Science described by Lederman et al. (2002), taken as a priori categories. The analysis of each aspect allowed the elaboration of a table with the description of each subject’s vision about each aspect and then it was possible to observe a general picture of the visions of these students. This study is in addition to others observing the necessity of the discussion about the Nature of Science throughout the teacher training, evidencing that some aspects are little or very little understood by pre-service teachers about to graduate.