Advanced science students’ understanding on nature of science in Turkey

The science and its aspects have importance for life in future society due to the new innovations of science and their integration into daily life. This significance is reflected under the title of “scientific literacy” in many attempts to education for life. Scientifically literate society of future requires decision making based on knowledge about science and its aspects. Nowadays, educational studies emphasise the importance of learning to use informed decision making ability in the problems of daily life (Damastes & Wandersee, 1992). Although literature covers many studies on the aspects of informed decision making in various areas of research, the Nature of Science (NOS) as an issue of informed decision making has become one of the most studied issues in science education research (Lederman, 2007; Palmquist & Finley, 1997).

Nature of science has many aspects for science education from scientific method to science in society. The results of epistemological and educational studies showed that there were common aspects to teach about nature of science in spite of some consensus problems (McComas, 1998). The aspects of nature of science which are commonly indicated are described with the following sentences. In its basic definition, science is a way of knowing and there is no universally accepted one way to do science. And also scientific knowledge is tentative since it is based on evidence and observation and it is also theory-laden. In addition, creativeness and imagination are important to produce scientific knowledge. In line with the theory-ladenness and personal differences, scientist is not objective when he or she begins to study; he or she has a background. As another aspect, there is a certain difference between observation and inference. There is no hierarchy among hypothesis, theory and law and laws and theories have different roles in science. As a different aspect, scientific knowledge is embedded in social and cultural context (McComas, 1998, Lederman, Abd-El-Khalick, Bell, and Schwartz, 2002).

Although many science lessons, textbooks and subjects begin with NOS issues and continue with content knowledge, we can read of the existence of extensive misunderstanding about NOS aspects in textbooks and the minds of students (Blanco & Niaz, 1997; McComas, 2003). At the same time, teachers, prospective teachers and teacher educators do not sufficiently understand and accept NOS as a school subject (Irez, 2006; Tsai, 2006; McComas, 2003; Blanco & Niaz, 1997). The studies conducted in Turkey have also shown existence of many misunderstandings on different nature of science aspects. In the study conducted by Kılıç, Sungur, Çakıroğlu and Tekkaya (2005) with 575 ninth grade students by using survey approach with Nature of Scientific Knowledge Scale (NSKS), they found that the participants were not certain whether the scientific knowledge is absolute or not whereas they hold informed view about creative and imaginative science. As a large-scale survey study on Turkish high school students, Dogan and Abd-El-Khalick (2008) studied 2087 tenth grade students by using Views on Science-Technology-Society (VOSTS) instrument. They found that all of the participants presented naïve understanding about lack of hierarchical relationship between hypotheses, theories and laws whereas majority of them hold informed views about tentativeness aspect. One important point is that studies which focus on NOS aspects, are generally determination or assessment of the aspects, whereas few of them are intervention studies using implicit, explicit or embedding strategies (Tsai, 2006; Khishfe & Lederman, 2007).

The dominant approach of determination and assessment studies in NOS literature, are limited in their capacity to explain what the varying aspects in misunderstanding are. This is because they have been performed on common students, teachers or prospective teachers. But, the epistemologies of them can vary with their background experiences and this variation makes it harder to study their knowledge about nature of science. Studying more specific groups in terms of science content knowledge may provide more comprehensive information. As a special group for epistemological experiences, advanced science students might provide different picture of understandings on the nature of science. Because these students become successful in the standard subject tests or other standard measurements on science content are taking part in more science courses or advanced science courses. Advanced science student means the student with high level of achievement, motivation, and attitude toward science. Therefore; there is a gap in the literature and a need to study advanced science students in terms of epistemological understanding. Studying advanced science students might provide a different pattern to consider in-class activities and experimental studies. Taking these problems into consideration, the purpose of this study is to determine academically advanced science students’ understanding of NOS in Turkey.