Preservice Teachers’ Images of Physical Scientists: Implications for Teacher Education

The goal of this research is to investigate the pre-service teachers’ images of physical scientists to gender. In this study, an instrument was used to elicit pre-service teachers’ images of a physical scientist, a modified version of Chambers’ (1983) Draw a Scientist Test. This study was conducted to 124 pre-service teachers, attended to teacher certification program, from Akdeniz University in Turkey. The collected qualitative and quantitative data were analysed to calculate the frequencies and percentages of some identified response patterns and to compare gender groups using Chi-Square test. Significant differences were found between female preservice teacher’s and male pre-service teachers’ images of physical scientists regarding some aspects. Results of this research will contribute to the researchers and educators studies on science education, teacher education, curriculum and instruction, measurement and evaluation, impact of gender on learning process, and nature of science