Is consensus generalizable? A study of Chinese science teacher educators’ views of nature of science content to be taught

Teaching about nature of science (NOS) has found an important place in the international science education community (AAAS, 1990a; CMEC, 1997; NRC, 1996)¹. In recent years, NOS is beginning to find its place in the science education in China as it appears in the goals of Chinese science curriculum reform documents (e.g., MOE, 2001a; 2001b)², some Chinese academic articles (e.g., Chen, 2006; Ding, 2002; Xiang, 2002; Yuan, 2005) and textbooks of training science teachers (e.g., Liu, 2004; Yu, 2002; Zhang, 2004).

NOS has long been a prominent area of active research in science education in Western countries and regions for number of decades (Lederman, Abd-El-Khalick, Bell, & Schwartz, 2002), where the existing literature can, to some extent, inform the science education practitioners’ views of NOS education. However, little is known about how the teaching of NOS is perceived by the practitioners in China. Given the unique social, political and historical backgrounds of China, will there exist some views or perspectives of Chinese people that are different from the Westerner literature on NOS education? Guided by this question, an exploratory study was conducted to investigate Chinese teacher educators’ conceptions of teaching NOS to prospective science teachers, in which five key dimensions emerged from the data. This paper focuses on reporting one of them, i.e. NOS content to be taught to prospective science teachers.