Abstract:

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to develop a concrete material for teaching and changing misconceptions of prospective science teachers on mitosis. Design & Methodology: In the study, three stakeholder groups (prospective science teachers (n = 36), science teachers (n = 4) and education specialists (n = 5) were consulted for material development. This study is a case study in an integrated single state. The focus of the study is on "development of material to be used in teaching". For this purpose, a prototype of the teaching material was created before taking stakeholder opinions. Subsequently, the prototype of the teaching material was presented to the stakeholders' evaluation. Open-ended questionnaires were used to get the views of stakeholders. In addition, four teacher candidates were interviewed to increase the depth of the obtained data. As a separate set of data, self-assessments made by the researcher were also included in the study. For the analysis of the obtained data, the "comparison of conflicting ideas" was used. An explanatory suggestion in this way has been used to develop the framework model. Findings: The results of the study showed that the prospective teachers, the experts and the science teachers suggested more on “usability”, “alignment with teaching objectives” and “understandability” for increasing quality of the material as a teaching material while they suggested more on “intelligibility”, “fruitfulness” and “plausibility” aspects for providing conceptual change. In addition, findings of the experimental study showed that the material contributed to decrease prospective science teachers’ misconceptions regarding functions of sentrosomes, content of stages in mitosis, functions of spindle and resulting number of cells in mitosis.

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