Tim Allison:  A Virtual Portfolio

Teaching the Nature of Science

Metareflection:
(the initial reflection is below)

Our students should understand the true nature of science.  Having them leave our classrooms with an inappropriate understanding of the nature of science is comparable to having them believing that Mendelian inheritance is universally applicable; or that the Bohr model of the atom is perfectly accurate -- scenarios, which, as Allchin suggests, are entirely unacceptable.  Prior to reading the article by Khishe and Abd-El-Khalick, I had never thought of the nature of science as being something which science teachers should teach to their students.  However, thinking back on my own experiences in high school science, we were taught half-truths and outright lies.  Stories like 'the pH scale only goes between 1 and 14;' 'a scientific theory is established fact, and when it is proven, it becomes a law;' 'scientific laws never change;' and 'only plant cells have a cell wall.'

Gilbert, Osborne, and Fensham discuss the idea of 'children's science.'  Part of a child's view of science and scientists is his (or her) understanding of the nature of science.  As a young boy, I desperately wanted to become a 'scientist.'  This resulted from my view of the nature of scientific work:  scientists were men who wore white lab coats, had messy hair and thick glasses, and worked in isolated labs where they spent much of their time blowing things up.  As I proceeded through my science education, I quickly learned that this was not the case, but fortunately my love for science did not suffer as a result.  As Gilbert, Osborne, and Fensham suggest, it is necessary for us to move our students towards a "coherent scientific perspective."  This applies, I believe, not only to the scientific concepts and processes which we teach them in our school, but to the nature of science itself.  As  Khishfe and Abd-El-Khalick (p. 551) suggest, the best way of teaching them about the nature of science may not be in letting them discover it themselves through doing science, but in an "explicit and reflective inquiry-oriented...instructional approach."

Reflection -- Teaching the Nature of Science

Article:

In the traditional way of teaching science, students are expected to learn about the nature of science by doing science. Perhaps not surprisingly, many students develop erroneous views on the nature of science as a result. Many students of science cling tightly to their view of scientists as people who follow a strictly regimented method; whose sole purpose in life is to make new discoveries; and who are always a hundred percent sure about their ideas before they put them forward. Certainly, this is the view I held until about half-way through my bachelor of science, when, through conversations with friends and professors, I came to the understanding that science was frighteningly different from that view. The authors of this article examined the influence of teaching students about the nature of science in class, rather than expecting them to discover it on their own. While this was not something I had previously considered (after all, no one had ever done it with me!), their results were striking, and I feel that it will likely change, to some extent, the way that I approach teaching science. Students should understand the true nature of the material that they are learning, and this does not seem to occur often in a science classroom.

Khishfe and Abd-El-Khalick studied two grade VI classes. On of these classes was expected to learn about the nature of science by traditional methods – that is, they were expected to learn about it by doing science. The other class actually discussed (informally) what their class work had taught them about the nature of science. By the end of the study, which lasted two and a half months, the former group had not improved their understanding of the nature of science. The group which actually considered their own work and what it had shown them about the nature of science had progressed considerably in their understanding of the concepts examined by the authors.

Gilbert, Osborne, and Fensham, while not discussing the nature of science directly, do suggest that children’s views on science are strongly held to; and this idea is reinforced by Khishfe and Abd-El-Khalick’s paper ("changing students’ views of…[the] nature of science has been shown to be a difficult process" (p. 574)). Gallas comes closer to discussing the nature of science that we need to be teaching our students: "I have also confirmed my long held conviction that the process of scientific discovery is firmly rooted in intuition and imagination." (Gallas p. 14) This is an aspect of the nature of science specifically addressed by Khishfe and Abd-El-Khalick in their paper. They indicate that "students fail to appreciate the role of scientists’ ideas in guiding scientific investigations, which they believe adhere to prescribed stepwise methods that exclude elements of imagination and creativity from the process of generating valid scientific knowledge." (p. 552) Certainly, this is an idea generally reinforced by the way that science is taught in our schools. Besides the concept of the imaginative nature of science, the authors looked at the students’ views on the tentative nature of science; the distinction between observation and inference; and the empirical nature of science. Their finding, in the end, was that, while the views on each of these aspects of the nature of science were not significantly different between the two classes at the beginning of the study, "the implicit group participants’ postinstruction views were no different from their preinstruction views. However, the postinstruction nature of science views of participants in the explicit group were substantially different from the views they elucidated at the beginning of the study." (p. 566)

By teaching the nature of science, however informally, we can develop children who understand the tentative and unempirical nature of science; who understand the value of imagination and inference in scientific investigation; and who, perhaps, enjoy the material a little more, as a result of not seeing it as a rigid set of rules. Leaving students to discover the nature of science on their own, as is done in most science classes now, will leave them with the view that science must always be a stiff, unimaginative process based entirely on observation, a view which is inaccurate, to say the least. Khishfe and Abd-El-Khalick suggest, also, that "changes in students’ nature of science views depend on the content and context within which these views are presented and learned…. Participants were more able to make sense of the target nature of science aspects in a context that was more relevant and interesting to them (i.e., dinosaurs) compared with more abstract and complex subject matter (i.e., structure of matter)." (p. 574) This relates directly to the philosophy of Juan, the teacher in Volkmann’s article, who suggests that "laboratory science is meaningful only when the experiment is made relevant to the students’ experience." (Volkmann p. 103) This, of course, will hold true for all aspects of science, including the nature of science. Students will always learn most easily if the material is made interesting and/or if they can see its relevance to their lives. And so, by making class materials interesting and by discussing the implications of class work relative to the nature of science, we can develop students who understand just what the nature of science really is.