Professional development is an important component of in-service science teacher education. In Turkey, it is usually organized and applied by the Ministry of Education. In recent years, Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (STRCT) has been supported science teacher professional development projects to educate science teachers on developing and supervising a project. STRCT also supports students’ science projects and organizes project competitions throughout the country. In order to increase the quality of students’ science projects, the council considered training science teachers on project process and its supervision. This study reports such a science teacher training at a science camp. The main goal of the science camp program was providing first-hand experience for science teachers on the process of project work from the planning to publishing.

There were also some other issues in science teacher professional development as to introduce contemporary science teaching and learning methods to support their professional development on science education. In order to enrich science camp program to support science teachers on these aspects of science education, some sessions related to nature of science (NOS), problem-based learning, project-based learning, and science simulation games. Teaching NOS was more dominant than other issues and more sessions were conducted to teach NOS than problem-based learning, project-based learning, and science simulation games. Because, understanding NOS was considered as a main element of scientific literacy and most of European countries including Turkey and the U.S. state the importance of NOS in science education programs. But, most of the research studies showed that science teachers had naïve views about most aspects of NOS (Abd-El-Khalick, 2005; Abd-El-Khalick & Akerson, 2004; Akerson, Abd-El-Khalick & Lederman, 2000). After such research results, some interventions were conducted to develop science teachers NOS views (Abd-El-Khalick & Lederman, 2000). This paper reports effectiveness of the science camp on participating science and a few math teachers.     

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