Tracking the Footprints Puzzle: The problematic persistence of science‐as‐process in teaching the nature and culture of science

Abstract

For many decades, science educators have asked, "In what ways should learning the content of traditional subjects serve as the means to more general ends, such as understanding the nature of science or the processes of scientific inquiry?" Acceptance of these ends reduces the role of disciplinary context; the "Footprints Puzzle" and Oregon's "Inquiry Scoring Guide" illustrate this point. In the Footprints Puzzle, students are challenged to distinguish observations from inferences to learn about the nature of science or the culture of science. Oregon's Inquiry Scoring Guide separates content knowledge from inquiry skills. Given long-standing discredit of "the" scientific method, modern views emphasize the diversity of inquiry methods and explanatory ideals across disciplines. Paleontologists, for example, reconstruct the behavior of extinct beasts from fossil footprints using methods of inquiry responsive to this aim. Figuring out dinosaur locomotion depends upon making analogies to the limb structure and behavior of extant species. The history of the Footprints Puzzle demonstrates that an enduring adherence to "a process approach" obscures how conceptualization intertwines with methodology.

Objects prompt authentic scientific activities among learners in a museum programme

“…This means that when we seek to understand how objects prompt engagement in science, we cannot simply invoke the idea of a universal scientific method featuring domainfree skills as a way to observe and assess this engagement. Different disciplines conduct investigations in different ways (Ault & Dodick, 2010;Crawford, 2014); indeed, science is the variety of methods and techniques that scientists actually use to explore diverse phenomena -science is what scientists do (Rudolph, 2007). To understand what kinds of scientific engagement objects can prompt and support, we can thus look to the scientific community for whom the objects in question are sites for interpretation and sources of information.…”

“…Palaeontologists are aware that fossils differ from each other due to their unique histories and that this affects what can be reliably predicted from them (Ault & Dodick, 2010). For this reason, the observation and interpretation of the furcula in Archaeopteryx by palaeontologists is based on a careful extrapolation of observations of all twelve existing specimens.…”

“…Conversely, we can also see how a discipline-specific approach may provide a more well-defined picture of the scientific knowledge or practice at stake. As discussed in the introduction, scientists engineer inquiry methods that fit particular contexts by using imagery, imagination, and relevant knowledge (Ault & Dodick, 2010). Our discipline-specific lens allowed us to capture similar scientific behaviours among the programme participants in the present study, responding to recent calls from museum research to direct the attention of learners towards the practices that give object meaning in disciplinary communities (Schauble, 2002).…”

Black & white or shades of grey : teachers perspectives on the role of nature of science in compulsory school science teaching

“…These activities are in line with suggestions in Ault and Dodick (2010) and Schizas et al (2016) who argue that NOS is deeply discipline and context specific, which means that the specificities of time, place, and individuals need to be taken into account. Examples of contextualized activities are:…”

“…Instead, similar to most research on NOS, the goal is to accomplish functional literacy . Another argument is that the tenets describe science in a too general and unspecific way with regards to the specificities of different contexts and scientific disciplines (Ault & Dodick, 2010;Wong & Hodson, 2010). The differences between scientific disciplines go well beyond the practicalities of how things are done, to also include discourses and epistemological underpinnings (Rudolph, 2000;Knorr-Cetina, 1999;Schizas et al, 2016).…”