Investigation of the Effect of the Interdisciplinary Instructional Approach on Pre-service Science Teachers’ Cognitive Structure about the Concept of Energy

The purpose of the current study is to investigate the effect of the interdisciplinary instructional approach-based energy teaching on the pre-service science teachers’ cognitive structure about the concept of energy and their ability to create connections between the concepts. The study was conducted on 66 fourth-year students attending the Science Teaching Department at a state university in the fall term of 2016-2017 academic year for a period of ten weeks. Two study groups were determined in the study, and one of these groups was given the energy instruction by means of the interdisciplinary teaching approach and the other group was given the energy instruction by using the traditional methods. As the data collection tools, “The Independent Word Association Test” and “The Drawing-Writing Technique” were used. In the analysis of the collected data, the descriptive and content analyses were employed. As a result of the study, it was found that the interdisciplinary teaching applications developed and enriched the students’ cognitive structures about the concept of energy