Advanced science students’ understanding on nature of science in Turkey

The results of the study are presented by showing the categories of each participant for each aspect studied. For the categorization of the participants, three classes; naive, mixed and expert were utilized. If the participants provided accepted understanding to related aspect of NOS in their answers to all questions, they were classified as expert while they were classified as naive when they presented unaccepted positivistic understandings on the related NOS aspect in all answers. The participants who presented both accepted and unaccepted understandings in all their answers, they were classified as mixed. Table 2 shows statements of participants on seven aspects of NOS.

Table 2. The results of content analysis of the students’ answers

Student

NOS Aspects

Empirical basis

Observation and inference

Subjectivity

Tentativeness

Social and cultural embeddedness

Theories and laws

Creativity

St1

St2

St3

St4

St5

St6

St7

St8

St9

St10

St11

St12

St13

St14

St15

St16

Note: N: Naïve, M: Mixed, E: Expert

As seen in table 2, the majority of the students were found to be naïve in terms of “observation and inference”, “social and cultural embeddedness” and “theories and laws” aspects, whereas the majority of them were expert on the aspects of “tentativeness” and “subjectivity”. The students had naïve or mixed understanding on the aspect of “empirical basis”. In addition to these categories, quotations from students’ writings might be more helpful to present understandings of them. Following sentences include the explanations of some participants.

Example excerpts for the aspects are provided in the following sentences in an order of the aspects presented in table 2. As the first aspect in table 2, majority of the participants are naive in terms of “empirical nature of science”. This is clear in their statements for the related question, for instance, one of the participants (St1) claimed that “science includes experiment and research and also uses evidence, but religion also includes use of evidence provided by the God”. Another participant (St12)’ writings presented another naïve understanding about “observation and inference” aspect. The students stated that “it is understood by the experiments conducted on structure of atom that electrons spin and are located at the outer part of an atom”. The participant’s statement is an indication of the belief that experiment results are enough to construct atom model without any inference. In spite of these naïve understandings, there are expert understandings about “subjectivity” aspect. Writing of one participant (St4) can be shown as an example for this; the participant wrote that reaching different conclusions with the same data set is related to “differences in interpretation of data, for example; if I loose my pencil, I might claim it is stolen whereas my mother might claim it is in your bag. Everything in this situation is related to human thinking”. As another aspect about which majority of the participants are expert, “tentativeness of scientific knowledge” is explained by the participant (St 5) stating that “scientific theories are always in a change process, development in technology increases ways we use; therefore we can invent new things or improve existent things”. In addition, one of the participants (St14) believed that “I think, science is universal and does not reflect social and cultural values”. These explanations are examples of misunderstandings about social and cultural embeddedness of science and scientific knowledge production process. Another participant (St5) answered the same question that “scientific theories are accepted judgments that are not proved and they [scientific theories] always change. Scientific laws are proved judgments with experiments”. In this statement, the participant exhibited one common misunderstanding about existence of a hierarchy between theories and laws. Then, the same participant claimed that “science should be universal and it [science] should not be affected by anything”. The aspect of creativity is another issue the participants provided pretty varied understandings. Majority of them were classified as mixed for this aspect. As an example, one participant (St 5) stated that “science is made of creative thinking; creativity is seen in all of the phases of a scientific investigation such as planning, observing, analyzing and explanation producing”. In spite of the clear advocacy of creativity in science, the same participant made an inappropriate explanation as an example for use of creativity in science that “Newton used creativity to find law of gravity when an apple fall on his head”. In this explanation, there is no clear cite to the scientific processes in which creativity is used and the basic idea behind this example is that science is related immediate observations and use of immediate creativity in that time.