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Asia-Pacific Forum
on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 10, Issue 1, Article 4
(June, 2009) |
Most of the pre-service science teachers in this study, like other pre-service teachers around the world, held uninformed conceptions about the roles of hypotheses, theories, and laws, particularly the “laws-are-mature-theories-fables” (Abd-El-Khalick et al., 1998; Rubba & Harkness, 1993; Thye & Kwen, 2003) that lead them to perceive theories as less secure than laws (Ogunniyi, 1982).
The tentativeness of science or dynamic of science is highly recognised by pre-service science teachers (Abd-El-Khalick et al., 1998; Bell et al., 2000; Craven et al., 2002; Mellado, 1997; Murcia & Schibeci, 1999; Palmquist & Finley, 1997). However, they did not raise subjectivity or creativity as important factors that make science tentative, like Bell, Lederman, and Abd-El-Khalic (2000) noticed, but instead raised the discovery of new credible evidence. The caution before making judgments about pre-service teachers’ ideas about the tentativeness of science is that the “laws-are-mature-theories-fables” might lead them to mistakenly answer the tentativeness of science item ”correctly” (Bell et al., 2000; Thye & Kwen, 2003).
Scientific progress can be best described as a revisionary process rather than a cumulative process (Brickhouse, 1990). However, a majority of pre-service science teachers in this study, similar to that of Haidar (1999), strongly believed in Baconian induction. They viewed science as cumulative knowledge, i.e., individual pieces of evidence are collected and examined until a law is discovered or a theory is invented. They were not aware of the problem of induction, i.e., “even a preponderance of evidence does not guarantee the production of valid knowledge” (McComas, 1998, p. 58).
Pre-service science teachers who believed that a scientific model is not a copy of reality, similar to Haidar (1999) and Bell, Lederman, and Abd-El-Khalick (2000), believed this because a model is created from scientists’ imaginations as an educated guess. Other pre-service teachers believed that a scientific model is a copy of reality, which is similar to the findings of Ogunniyi (1982) and Thye and Kwen (2003).
The pre-service science teachers in this study were highly uninformed and uncertain about the scientific method. They strongly believed in the universal, step-wise scientific method, which is widely propagated in school science textbooks (Craven et al., 2002; Haidar, 1999; Mellado, 1997; Murcia & Schibeci, 1999; Palmquist & Finley, 1997). Also, the form of cookbook or verification-type laboratory activities, unfortunately, leads student teachers to portray science as a rigid procedural investigation leading to reliable, valid and dependable knowledge (Palmquist & Finley, 1997). In this study, the fixed process of the scientific method is also linked with the objectivity of scientific knowledge (Gallagher, 1991; Mellado, 1997), but is not linked with the character of scientists as in Haidar’s (1999) study. The term “scientific method” itself is, maybe, an issue. Abd-El-Khalick and BouJaoude (1997) found that without explicitly stating the term “scientific method,” almost all teachers (94%) in their study adopted the more informed view that science activities are not completely logical and sequential.
Many pre-service science teachers neither believed nor were uncertain whether science and the scientific method can answer all questions. They raised questions about many phenomena that are unexplainable by science. In this group, some student teachers considered time as a major factor, predicting that at some point in the future, scientists will come up with explanations for these phenomena. More than half of pre-service science teachers believed that scientific knowledge is not solely originated from experiments. They frequently brought up observation and other methods of knowledge accumulation (Thye & Kwen, 2003).
Creativity and imagination were highly regarded as important in developing scientific knowledge, in particular to creating scientific models and designing experiments (Abd-El-Khalick et al., 1998; Bell et al., 2000; Murcia & Schibeci, 1999). A minority of pre-service science teachers believed in objectivity in science (Murcia & Schibeci, 1999; Thye & Kwen, 2003), and also raised it as an important characteristic of scientists, as in (Palmquist & Finley, 1997), in order to be successful in their work.
The idea that technology is an applied science is dominant among pre-service science teachers in this study. They cannot easily distinguish between science and technology (Rubba & Harkness, 1993). This finding has strong cultural roots because people tend to “point to artefacts and systems that followed scientific discoveries,” e.g., atomic physics leading to nuclear power generation and electrical research leading to dynamos and transformers. Consequently, science educators should present a clear distinction between science and technology and advocate the complexity and the interactive nature of the relationship between science and technology, or “interactionist perspective” (Tairab, 2001, p. 245). Three patterns of relationships between science and technology emerged in this study. One of them is similar to that described by Rubba and Harkness (1993), i.e., science interacts with technology. A majority of pre-service science teachers believed in science as a social activity, which is greatly influenced by society, culture and politics (Bell et al., 2000; Haidar, 1999; Mellado, 1997; Murcia & Schibeci, 1999; Rubba & Harkness, 1993; Tairab, 2001). Only a few prospective teachers did not perceive the influences of society, culture and politics on science advancement (Tairab, 2001).
