English secondary students’ thinking about the status of scientific theories: consistent,comprehensive, coherent and extensively evidenced explanations of aspects of the natural world – or just ‘an idea someone has’

Teaching about the nature of science (NOS) is seen as a priority for science education in many national contexts. The present paper focuses on one central issue in learning about NOS: understanding the nature and status of scientific theories. A key challenge in teaching about NOS is to persuade students that scientific knowledge is generally robust and reliable, yet also in principle always open to challenge and modification. Theories play a central role, as they are a form of conjectural knowledge that over time may be abandoned, replaced, modified, yet sometimes become well established as current best scientific understanding. The present paper reports on findings from interviews with 13–14 year olds in England where target knowledge presents theories as ‘consistent, comprehensive, coherent and extensively evidenced explanations of aspects of the natural world’. Student thinking reflected a two-tier typology of scientific knowledge in which largely unsupported imaginative ideas (‘theories’) became transformed into fairly definitive knowledge (such as laws) through relatively straightforward testing. These results are considered in relation to research into intellectual development which indicates that effective teaching in this area requires careful scaffolding of student learning, but has potential to contribute to supporting intellectual development across the curriculum.     

Two Views About Explicitly Teaching Nature of Science

Our focus is on the effects that dated ideas about the nature of science (NOS) have on curriculum, instruction and assessments. First we examine historical developments in teaching about NOS, beginning with the seminal ideas of James Conant. Next we provide an overview of recent developments in philosophy and cognitive sciences that have shifted NOS characterizations away from general heuristic principles toward cognitive and social elements. Next, we analyze two alternative views regarding ‘explicitly teaching’ NOS in pre-college programs. Version 1 is grounded in teachers presenting ‘Consensus-based Heuristic Principles’ in science lessons and activities. Version 2 is grounded in learners experience of ‘Building and Refining Model-Based Scientific Practices’ in critique and communication enactments that occur in longer immersion units and learning progressions. We argue that Version 2 is to be preferred over Version 1 because it develops the critical epistemic cognitive and social practices that scientists and science learners use when (1) developing and evaluating scientific evidence, explanations and knowledge and (2) critiquing and communicating scientific ideas and information; thereby promoting science literacy.     

Children's astronomy: implications for curriculum developments at Key Stage 1 and the future of infant science in England and Wales

Experience suggests that few areas of science could claim to capture the interest, curiosity and imagination of young children as much as astronomy does, few are more relevant and fundamental to their everyday lives, and few are more stimulating, motivating and fun. Infant and primary astronomy is concerned with more, however, than teaching concepts and process skills or about learning facts and figures. It is certainly more than simply knowing about the periodic changes associated with how the Earth, Sun and Moon move with respect to one another. It is about the nature of science and ‘scientific’ thought. It is about human achievement. It is about feelings and emotions; our relationships with each other and our relationships with nature. It is about the many important aspects of time, cycles and change. From this standpoint, radical changes to the early years astronomy component of a recently introduced and twice revised national science curriculum operating in all maintained schools throughout England and Wales are considered both misguided and premature. Exploring the nature of infant children's ideas and beliefs in certain astronomical areas, concerns about the direction of curriculum developments and the status of early years science are discussed.     

Traversing the Divide Between High School Science Students and Sophisticated Nature of Science Understandings: A Multi-pronged Approach

This study investigated the effects of a multi-pronged approach of increasing the nature of science (NOS) understandings of high school science students. The participants consist of 63 high school students: 31 in the intervention group and 32 in the control group. Explicit/reflective NOS instruction was imbedded within authentic inquiry experiences and supported by online discussions. The students in the intervention group were prompted to engage in various discussions focusing on essential tenets of NOS in an online environment that assured student confidentiality. NOS views were assessed through multiple data sources including pre- and post-intervention questionnaires as well as students’ responses to online discussion prompts. Results show that the instructional intervention used in this study which combined explicit/reflective NOS instruction with intense inquiry exposure along with ample reflective opportunities in an anonymous online discussion format led to positive learning gains in participants’ understanding the NOS aspects assessed. Implications for enhancing data collection with high school students and for promising professional development opportunities for science educators are discussed.     

Addressing the Nature of Science in Preservice Science Teacher Preparation Programs: Science Educator Perceptions

The nature of science (NOS) has a prominent role among the national science education content standards at all grade levels, K–12. Results from a national survey of collegiate science educators indicate the perception that the greatest contributors to preservice teachers’ understanding of the nature of science were science methods courses, research projects, and science content courses. Implications of findings are discussed, including connections to current research concerning teacher preparation for effective NOS classroom teaching and student learning.The Nature of Science course on the authors’ campus was initiated in the early 1990s, has evolved, and remains in the required core curriculum for preservice chemistry, earth science, and physics teacher candidates. It is the capstone for NOS insights. It adds to and refines impressions garnered implicitly from science content courses, the methods course, and, for some, an undergraduate research experience.     

Drawing Nature of Science in Pre-service Science Teacher Education: Epistemic Insight Through Visual Representations

Developing pre-service science teachers’ epistemic insight remains a challenge, despite decades of research in related bodies of work such as the nature of science (NOS) in science education. While there may be numerous aspects to this problem, one critical element is that the NOS is a meta-concept that demands higher-order cognitive skills. One possible strategy to facilitate pre-service teachers’ understanding of epistemic aspects of science is visualisation. Visual representations of objects and processes can be tools for developing and monitoring understanding. Although the NOS and visualisation literatures have been studied extensively, the intersection of these bodies of literatures has been minimal. Incorporating visual tools on the NOS in teacher education is likely to facilitate teachers’ learning, eventually impacting their students’ learning of the NOS. The objective of this paper is to illustrate how the visual tools of scientific knowledge and practices aspects of the NOS can be integrated in science teacher education in order to develop pre-service teachers’ epistemic insight. The paper presents an empirical study that incorporated visual tools about the NOS in primary science teacher education. Data on 14 pre-service teachers’ are presented along with in-depth case studies of 3 pre-service teachers illustrating the influence of the teacher education intervention. The qualitative analysis of visual representations before and after the intervention as well as verbal data suggests that there was improvement in pre-service teachers’ perceptions of the NOS. Implications for future research on visualisation of the NOS are discussed.     

Science Education at the National Institute for Pedagogical Research,Paris, France

This article explores the nature of a continuing mismatch between curriculum reform rhetoric in science education and actual classroom practice. Lack of philosophical consensus about the nature of science (NOS); lack of appropriate curriculum guidance, classroom materials and pedagogical content knowledge for NOS teaching; teachers’ personal theories of learning; and the realities of classroom constraints are all implicated as interacting factors that contribute to the mismatch. Because curriculum policy is political, with pressure brought to bear by many interest groups, it is suggested that the science teaching community cannot adequately address the issues raised in the absence of wider community debate and support.     

Searching for Components of Conceptual Ecology That Mediate Development of Epistemological Beliefs in Science

This paper articulates the importance of epistemological beliefs (EBs) and draws a parallel between EBs literature in educational psychology and nature of science (NOS) literature in science education. The paper stresses that EBs in science and NOS ideas have common ground and they can be best improved through explicit-reflective instruction informed by conceptual change theory. The paper concludes that future studies should explore the factors that mediate the development of EBs in science and NOS ideas rather than documenting the changes in students’ and teachers’ EBs in science and NOS ideas after explicit-reflective instruction through pre- and post assessments.     

Professional Journals as a Source of PCK for Teaching Nature of Science: An Examination of Articles Published in The Science Teacher (TST) (an NSTA Journal), 1995–2010

A number of science education policy documents recommend that students develop an understanding of the enterprise of science and the nature of science (NOS). Despite this emphasis, there is still a gap between policy and practice. Teacher professional literature provides one potential venue for bridging this gap, by providing “activities that work” (Appleton in elementary science teacher education: International perspectives on contemporary issues and practice. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, 2006) that can scaffold teachers’ developing pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for teaching NOS. We analyzed articles published in the NSTA journal The Science Teacher (1995–2010) in terms of the degree to which they provide appropriate model activities and specific information that can support the development of teachers’ PCK for teaching NOS. Our analysis revealed a diversity of NOS aspects addressed by the authors and a wide range of variation in the percent of articles focused on each aspect. Additionally, we found that few articles provided robust information related to all the component knowledge bases of PCK for NOS. In particular, within the extant practitioner literature, there are few models for teaching the aspects of NOS, such as the function and nature of scientific theory. Furthermore, though articles provided information relevant to informing teachers’ knowledge of instructional strategies for NOS, relevant information to inform teachers’ knowledge of assessment in this regard was lacking. We provide recommendations for ways in which the practitioner literature may support teachers’ teaching of NOS through more robust attention to the types of knowledge research indicates are needed in order to teaching NOS effectively.     

Darwin’s Difficulties and Students’ Struggles with Trait Loss: Cognitive-Historical Parallelisms in Evolutionary Explanation

Although historical changes in scientific ideas sometimes display striking similarities with students’ conceptual progressions, some scholars have cautioned that such similarities lack meaningful commonalities. In the history of evolution, while Darwin and his contemporaries often used natural selection to explain evolutionary trait gain or increase, they struggled to use it to convincingly account for cases of trait loss or decrease. This study examines Darwin’s evolutionary writings about trait gain and loss in the Origin of Species (On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. D. Appleton, New York, 1859) and compares them to written evolutionary explanations for trait gain and loss in a large (n > 500), cross-cultural and cross-sectional sample (novices and experts from the USA and Korea). Findings indicate that significantly more students and experts applied natural selection to cases of trait gain, but like Darwin and his contemporaries, they more often applied ‘use and disuse’ and ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’ to episodes of trait loss. Although the parallelism between Darwin’s difficulties and students’ struggles with trait loss are striking, significant differences also characterize explanatory model structure. Overall, however, students and scientists struggles to explain trait loss—which is a very common phenomenon in the history of life—appear to transcend time, place, and level of biological expertise. The significance of these findings for evolution education are discussed; in particular, the situated nature of biological reasoning, and the important role that the history of science can play in understanding cognitive constraints on science learning.     

A Perspective on the Intended Science Curriculum in Iceland and its ‘Transformation’ over a Period of 50 Years

In recent decades, a consensus has emerged among educators and scientists that all compulsory school students need good science education. The debate about its purpose and nature as a school subject in an emerging information society has not been as conclusive. To further understand this, it helps to examine how the science curriculum has transformed and what forces have shaped it as a core curricular area over time. This article sheds light on the transformation of the science curriculum for compulsory schools in Iceland in force from 1960 to 2010. Using criteria based on curriculum ideologies regarding the function of learners, instructors and subject matter in the learning process and the orientation of content and product versus process and development, it offers findings from content analysis of the intended science curriculum. The official curriculum was studied and conceptualised as it has evolved over time. The curriculum developers appear to have been striving for a compromise between conflicting views, resulting in what the authors of this article conceive as a ‘kaleidoscopic quilt’ of ideas over the period studied.     

Dilemmas in examining understanding of nature of science in Vietnam

Scholars proved nature of science (NOS) has made certain contributions to science teaching and learning. Nonetheless, what, how and how much NOS should be integrated in the science curriculum of each country cannot be a benchmark, due to the influence of culture and society. Before employing NOS in a new context, it should be carefully studied. In assessing views of NOS in Vietnam, a developing country with Eastern culture where the NOS is not consider a compulsory learning outcome, there are several issues that researchers and educators should notice to develop an appropriate instrument that can clearly exhibit a NOS view of Vietnamese. They may include: time for the survey; length, content, type, and terms of the questionnaire; Vietnamese epistemology and philosophy; and some other Vietnamese social and cultural aspects. The most important reason for these considerations is that a Vietnamese view of NOS and NOS assessment possibly differs from the Western ideas due to the social and cultural impact. As a result, a Western assessment tool may become less effective in an Eastern context. The suggestions and implications in this study were derived from a prolonged investigation on Vietnamese science teacher educators and student teachers of School of Education, at Can Tho University, a State University in Mekong Delta region, Vietnam.     

复杂性科学视阈下的网络课程研究

网络课程,作为信息时代的一种本源性存在,有着独特而多变的系统组织和运行机制。通过对复杂性科学的缘起与发展解析,以及复杂性科学与教育教学和网络课程研究的相关性分析,网络课程这种复杂科学理论与课程研究领域相互吸引、碰撞和融合所涌现的崭新课程系统已清晰地呈现出来。根据复杂性科学的要素组成,从课程目标、课程环境、课程实施和课程评价四个方面,运用代表性复杂性科学理论加以对照和分析,探寻复杂性科学视阈下的网络课程重构,希冀寻找到关于众多网络课程问题的解决之道。     

The Nature of Science and the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Next Generation Science Standards</Emphasis>: Analysis and Critique

This paper provides a detailed analysis of the inclusion of aspects of nature of science (NOS) in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). In this new standards document, NOS elements in eight categories are discussed in Appendix H along with illustrative statements (called exemplars). Many, but not all, of these exemplars are linked to the standards by their association with either the “practices of science” or “crosscutting concepts,” but curiously not with the recommendations for science content. The study investigated all aspects of NOS in NGSS including the accuracy and inclusion of the supporting exemplar statements and the relationship of NOS in NGSS to other aspects of NOS to support teaching and learning science. We found that while 92 % of these exemplars are acceptable, only 78 % of those written actually appear with the standards. “Science as a way of knowing” is a recommended NOS category in NGSS but is not included with the standards. Also, several other NOS elements fail to be included at all grade levels thus limiting their impact. Finally, NGSS fails to include or insufficiently emphasize several frequently recommended NOS elements such as creativity and subjectivity. The paper concludes with a list of concerns and solutions to the challenges of NOS in NGSS.     

What Third-Grade Students of Differing Ability Levels Learn about Nature of Science after a Year of Instruction

This study explored third-grade elementary students' conceptions of nature of science (NOS) over the course of an entire school year as they participated in explicit-reflective science instruction. The Views of NOS-D (VNOS-D) was administered pre instruction, during mid-school year, and at the end of the school year to track growth in understanding over time. The Young Children's Views of Science was used to describe how students conversed about NOS among themselves. All science lessons were videotaped, student work collected, and a researcher log was maintained. Data were analyzed by a team of researchers who sorted the students into low-, medium-, and high-achieving levels of NOS understandings based on VNOS-D scores and classwork. Three representative students were selected as case studies to provide an in-depth picture of how instruction worked differentially and how understandings changed for the three levels of students. Three different learning trajectories were developed from the data describing the differences among understandings for the low-, medium-, and high-achieving students. The low-achieving student could discuss NOS ideas, the medium-achieving student discussed and wrote about NOS ideas, the high-achieving student discussed, wrote, and raised questions about NOS ideas.     

概论联合国教科文组织与全球教育治理

联合国机构已成为一类活着的独特人类学现象和文化,对其全球治理的查考和研究应借鉴人类学民族志方法。联合国教科文组织秉承的人文主义理念逐步演变为从生物圈整体观视域审视教育在支持人类追求公共利益中的价值。联合国教科文组织采用柔性理念立法、基于理念共识的软性执法和国际协商共治的治理框架,践行的是政府间共治议会制与人文主义理念引导的类科层制行政组织结构。应从治理主客体关系角度分析联合国教科文组织强势国家治理主体相互制衡的历史流变,分析去国家中心主义的多元治理体格局,由此确定中国平等参与和主动引领全球教育治理的战略决策。     

David N. Reznick’s The “Origin” Then and Now: An Interpretive Guide to the “Origin of Species”: A Précis

David Reznick is one of the world’s leading evolutionary biologists. His book on Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species is given here in a précis, in order to show the underlying approach that he takes towards a work that is a classic in his field. It is shown that Reznick’s interests are less in Darwin for his own sake and more in the importance of Darwin’s ideas for science today.     

A Community College Instructor’s Reflective Journey Toward Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Nature of Science in a Non-majors Undergraduate Biology Course

Research supports an explicit-reflective approach to teaching about nature of science (NOS), but little is reported on teachers’ journeys as they attempt to integrate NOS into everyday lessons. This participatory action research paper reports the challenges and successes encountered by an in-service teacher, Sarah, implementing NOS for the first time throughout four units of a community college biology course (genetics, molecular biology, evolution, and ecology). Through the action research cycles of planning, implementing, and reflecting, Sarah identified areas of challenge and success. This paper reports emergent themes that assisted her in successfully embedding NOS within the science content. Data include weekly lesson plans and pre/post reflective journaling before and after each lesson of this lecture/lab combination class that met twice a week. This course was taught back to back semesters, and this study is based on the results of a year-long process. Developing pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for NOS involves coming to understand the overlaps and connections between NOS, other science subject matter, pedagogical strategies, and student learning. Sarah found that through action research she was able to grow and assimilate her understanding of NOS within the biology content she was teaching. A shift in orientation toward teaching products of science to teaching science processes was a necessary shift for NOS pedagogical success. This process enabled Sarah’s development of PCK for NOS. As a practical example of putting research-based instructional recommendations into practice, this study may be very useful for other teachers who are learning to teach NOS.