Pre-service science teachers' cognitive structures regarding Science,Technology,Engineering,Mathematics (STEM) and science education

The aim of this study is to reveal pre-service science teachers' cognitive structures regarding science,technology,engineering,mathematics (stem) and science education. the study group of the study consisted of 192 pre-service science teachers. a free word association test (wat) consisting of science,technology,engineering,mathematics and science education concepts and semi-structured interview records were utilised to reveal their opinions regarding these concepts and inter-conceptual relations were used as data collection tools. while the wat was implemented with all of the pre-service teachers,semi-structured interviews were carried out with only eight of the pre-service science teachers. using two data collection tools via triangulation,enabled the researchers to obtain similar and varied findings. according to the frequencies,wat was analysed using the cut-offpoint (cp) method; hence,concept network maps were composed and interviews were descriptively analysed. the findings of the study revealed that pre-service teachers' cognitive structures involved stem disciplines and science education were quite independent from each other. also,they could not make a distinction between science concept and science education concept,nor associate 'technology,engineering and mathematics' concepts with science and science education' concepts.