Designing and evaluating short teaching interventions about the epistemology of science in high school classrooms

Abstract

This paper reports the design and evaluation of small-scale teaching interventions addressing the epistemology of science as part of the regular high school science courses followed by English students. Although there is a growing consensus that the curriculum should include aspects of the nature of science, there is a limited body of knowledge about how this might be achieved in an already crowded curriculum. Single lessons were designed in order to raise epistemological questions in subject matter contexts likely to be encountered by students as part of regular teaching. This paper presents findings from an evaluation of the teaching, addressing both the impact of the resources and associated teaching strategies on student learning, and teachers' reactions to the interventions. The teaching interventions were successful in their aim of "opening up" epistemological issues with a majority of students. A significant minority of students did not make any progress in terms of their responses to diagnostic questions, even though they appeared able to participate in the lesson's activities. The paper concludes with a discussion of issues surrounding the design and implementation of teaching with an epistemological focus in the context of crowded science curricula. RESEARCH FOCUSThere is a growing consensus that science curricula should promote an understanding of the nature of science amongst students (e.g., AAAS, 1990;Millar, 1996;Millar & Osborne, 1998; National Research Council (NRC), 1996). There is also considerable evidence that, in some settings, many high school science students give limited and inaccurate portrayals of the nature of scientific knowledge (e.g.

Students' perceptions of the nature of evolutionary theory

“…Instead of asking what big ideas about science do we want to embed in the science context, we need to ask what nature of science concepts are integral to the development of the target scientific theory (such as evolutionary theory, plate tectonics), and then design a curriculum that attends to them in context. Much like Passmore and Stewart's (2002) modeling approach to teaching evolutionary biology in high school, similar curricular models can be developed in relation to other topics to promote rich discipline-based understandings of science and scientific inquiry (see also Leach et al, 2003;Stewart & Rudolph, 2001).…”

“…Some researchers have focused on the effectiveness of different approaches to teaching the nature of science in the general context of student learning (Abd-El-Khalick & Lederman, 2000a;Bartholomew et al, 2004) or teacher preparation (Abd-El-Khalick & Lederman, 2000b;Khishfe & Abd-El-Khalick, 2002), while others have focused on teaching the nature of science in the context of specific disciplinary frameworks (Abd-El-Khalick, 2001;Brickhouse et al, 2002;Driver et al, 1996;Duschl, 1990;Leach, Hind, & Ryder, 2003;Matthews, 2000;Shipman et al, 2002). Improving students' and teachers' understanding of the nature of science has shifted from being a desirable goal, to being a central one for achieving scientific literacy (American Association for the Advancement of Science [AAAS], 1990;National Research Council, 1996).…”

Contextualization of Nature of Science Within the Socioscientific Issues Framework: A Review of Research

“…Students" understandings of NOS have been examined in numerous studies (e.g., Cil & Cepni, 2016;Köseoğlu, Tümay, & Budak, 2008;Leach, Hind, & Ryder, 2003;Liu & Lederman, 2002;Walker & Zeidler, 2003). Research has consistently shown that typically students have naive understandings of NOS (Khishfe & Lederman, 2006).…”

A compreensão dos estudantes sobre o papel da imaginação na produção das ciências

“…Além de aprender conceitos, modelos e teorias produzidos historicamente pelas ciências, esses documentos defendem a necessidade de que a educação escolar promova um conhecimento mais elaborado sobre as ciências. Conquanto possa ser relativamente fácil encontrar consenso sobre a importância de incorporar este ponto de vista na elaboração de uma educação em ciências para todos, há muito ainda que se discutir e que se compreender sobre como isso pode ser feito (LEACH; RYDER, 2003).…”