Narrative of Nature
of Science Concept Map
Erin E. Peters
Student understanding of the nature of science has played a central role in science education as evidenced in national documents such as the National Science Education Standards and Benchmarks for Science Literacy. Teaching students the nature of science gives students a substantial cognitive framework on which to hang scientific knowledge. In the past, there was not a consensus on what elements of the nature of science were important to teach, but recently there has been an agreement on the elements of the nature of science. The literature illustrates three different ways to go about examining the role of the nature of science in science education: professional development, student understanding, and pedagogy reform. The largest body of literature addresses teacher professional development of the nature of science. Much of the focus of these research projects is on pre-service teachers, and the studies show that learning the nature of science is a long-term process. This group of researchers agrees that teaching the nature of science should be done explicitly, as efforts to implicitly teach the nature of science through inquiry have been unsuccessful. Research shows that there are a large number of barriers, some know and some unknown, to learning the nature of science and have led to small successes in teaching the nature of science in an explicit way. Much of the research regarding student understandings of the nature of science focuses on changing students’ understandings through cognitive dissonance which can be evoked through inquiry activities and have shown to have limited success in teaching the principles of the nature of science. Pedagogy reform called for in the literature tries to reduce the conflict that students experience when they are taught scientific knowledge but not knowledge about how science is done. Students are taught that science is a collection of knowledge in its final form, but then asked to understand that scientific knowledge can change, among other ideas regarding the nature of science.