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OF NEW IDEASWhen an idea, in any field of knowledge, is new and very fruitful it displays two interconnected and powerful features. First, it makes possible the linking of related incidents, perspectives, or disciplines, which may not previously have been thought to be connected at all. Because of this, it is able to focus attention on them in quite a new way. Soon unexpected branches of philosophy, and new research methodologies, are also brought in to illuminate the new field. It is all very exciting and stimulates wide reading and the forging of yet more connections.The other feature of a valuable new idea is almost paradoxical. It turns out to be not so new as to be contrary to recollection. Indeed, there will be practitioners in the field who have almost, but not quite, said this new thing already. This is not due to the well-known aphorism that there is nothing new under the sun. It arises because, in the social sciences at least, the objects of study are familiar to us. They are aspects of the human nature and learning that we know so well. We know them through our own nature, we know them because we empathise with them as we speak daily to friends and colleagues. If we did not recognise the new conceptualisation of human nature or human learning, providing we had tried to understand it as well as we could, then it seems fair to assume that the idea was either wrong in the sense of being farfetched or wrong-headed, or else hopelessly terminologically inept. Certainly the idea would be most unlikely to prove fruitful.So it is not so much that a new idea is discovered, as we used to be taught that Columbus discovered the West Indies which Europeans had never seen or imagined before. In the social sciences a new idea is discovered when it is

As social beings we need to legitimate the world picture we are continuously constructing and maintaining. So we hold out to others -in talk -our observations, discoveries, reflections, opinions, attitudes and values, and the responses we receive profoundly affect both the world picture we are creating and our view of ourselves.' Martin et al. 1976.

This article reports on 18 months of action research that monitored British pupils' learning about the nature of science, using some aspects of history of science for the purpose. The action research took place within five classrooms and involved practicing teachers who used a set of historical materials specially written for this study. Preliminary findings about the common perceptions of the nature of science held by middle school pupils (age 11–14 years) guided the work, which was carried out using a variety of methodologies. The results obtained show some areas of substantial progress in the pupils' understanding of the nature of science, and others where little change seems to have been effected.

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The methodology of this research tried to span the small scale and the large, the qualitative and the quantitative, present knowledge and proximal development. It took into account the results of previous small scale questionnaire studies, interviews ofgroups of students and action research in the classroom. These informed the results ofa large-scale questionnaire study of the nature of science.Few questions were asked which referred to knowledge acquired from two different domains: a. out-of-school images of science and scientist; b. ideas drawn from their own school experiences of science in the classroom and the laboratory. Knowing the strong effect of context we were anxious to keep the questions as general as possible. They were to probe the connection between theory and experiment in terms which, we had found, students ofage 15 years, could understand. The results showed a strikingly significant relation between the class teacher and the responses to most questions. The exceptions were in out-ofschool knowledge and confirmed our hypothesis about the two origins of students' knowledge about the nature of science.Looking for significant correlations between the students' answers to different questions revealed the presence of two interesting groups of students: the 'Explainers' and the 'Imaginers'. The first of these seemed to be reflective, and as having a more explanatory perception of science. However this was limited to their own laboratory experiences and did not extend to other cultures, or to the use of imaginative mental models. The second group -the 'imaginers' -were far fewer in the large sample of 15 year olds, but comparatively more numerous in a small sub-group ofolder students at age 17. Separating out this disappointingly small group of pupils we found that they were more interested in what goes on in the minds of scientists.

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This paper is derived from data gathered during a year-long classroom study on how pupils' views of the nature of science changed when some of their learning materials were historically situated. Five classes were involved and the evidence comprised pre-and post-tests, interviews and class tests.It is shown that life-world images of scientists as people, and the equipment with which each is associated, can be taken to represent pupils' epistemologies. This is related to contemporary thinking about the nature of knowledge and of technology.The questionnaire responses showed substantial progress during the year. The older ideas were not eliminated but stories from history seemed to have provided alternative images which generated more reflection. However, the results were complicated by the conflicting meanings for 'explain' held by many of the pupils. Some supplementary work carried out during the course explored the classroom methods by which teachers emphasized the causative rather than descriptive nature of explanation, and the pupils' ease of learning this.