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

Although NOS has been one of the commonly discussed topics in science education, there is not a unified way to define the phrase of NOS itself. On some occasions, it is defined as epistemology of science or nature of scientific knowledge (e.g. Abd-El-Khalick & Lederman, 2000; Lederman, 2007; Rudolph, 2003). At the same time, some other literature encompasses a much broader range of contents. As stated by McComas and his colleagues (1998),

The nature of science is a fertile hybrid arena which blends aspects of various social studies of science including the history, sociology, and philosophy of science combined with research from the cognitive science such as psychology into a rich description of what science is, how it works, how scientists operate as a social group and how society itself both directs and reacts to scientific endeavors. (p.4) (authors’ emphasis)

In this definition, the scope of NOS has apparently expanded from the previous definition dominated by one area of the studies on science (philosophy of science), into four areas of the study on science, i.e. history, sociology, psychology and philosophy of science.

Most recently, Irzik and Nola (2011) propose a family resemblance approach to NOS by comprehensively and systematically organizing the cognitive aspects of science into four categories: (i) activities (scientific inquiry), (ii) aims and values, (iii) methodologies and methodological rules, and, (iv) products (scientific knowledge). The authors further elaborate that the four categories of the cognitive aspects of science could be extended to accommodate the non-cognitive institutional and social norms which are operative in science and influence science.

Obviously, there are different meanings associated with the phrase NOS even among science educators in the West. Hence, the research in the present study has avoided adopting a fixed definition of NOS during the process of probing Chinese science teacher educators’ conception. An open stance to any possible differences in their views about the conceptions and meaning associated with the phrase NOS has been adopted to encourage the educators to speak out their mind.