Story telling: research and action to improve 6<sup>th</sup> grade students’ views about certain aspects of nature of science

This study was carried out on the basis of an action research methodology, because one of the researchers, who will be referred as “the teacher” from now on, is a practitioner science teacher who teaches science and technology courses at a rural middle school in the north-western region of Turkey. There were 15 students in the 6^th grade class. The teacher noticed that her 6^th grade students did not pay attention to science classes and conveyed an absolute view of scientific knowledge; she mentioned the problems that she has in her class to a professor (the second author). To address these issues, we selected collaborative action research as the methodology for this study. Capobianco (2007) expresses that the aim of action research is “to improve the quality of teaching and learning as well as the conditions under which teachers and students work in schools”. In the action research process, teachers going about their usual work of teaching, but a scientific process that includes a cycle of planning, action, and reflection is utilized. Collaborative action research involves the teacher and university researcher joining together to examine and take action to deal with different issues and concerns about the practice (Capobianco & Feldman, 2006). Firstly, we identified the problem more clearly by describing the classroom and exchanging ideas. We agreed on a design of teaching with HOS based stories and planned the research process. Every week, we met and reviewed our plan and the treatment process.

As all methodological frameworks, action research has some limitations; these are evident in this study as well. One of the main limitations of action research concerns bias of the researcher as teacher. However, many precautions were undertaken to maximize the rigor of this study, as described in following sections. Among these, a second researcher overviewed all steps of the study; every step was noted and reflected by the teacher; multiple data sources were utilized; and an overlap was sought between the raters in data analysis (Melrose, 2001).

HOS story cases and teaching science

Four HOS stories, including “To Dreams,” “Restless Creatures,” “Where,” and “Like Gold” were derived from a book titled “Scientific Goofs: Adventures Along the Crooked Trail to Truth,” written by Billy Aronson (2010) and implemented in the science classes. These HOS-based stories convey a few of the tenets of NOS described by McComas (2005). Table I shows the stories and the aspects of NOS that they address, which we believe that students may acquire while reading and discussing the stories in class.

Table I. The stories and the elements of NOS that they address

The story	Content of the story	Elements of NOS infused (Based on McComas, 2005)
“To Dreams”	The story is about dreaming about flying and the related scientific developments.	Science demands and relies on empirical evidence. There is no one-step scientific method by which all science is done. Experiments are not the only route for knowledge. Scientific knowledge is tentative but durable.
“Restless Creatures”	The story illustrated how scientists examined a common belief that ants or worms are generated without a reason and spontaneously in a scientific way.	Scientists may hold different ideas about the same phenomenon. Science demands and relies on empirical evidence. Knowledge production in science shares common methods and shared habits of mind, norms, logical thinking, and methods. Scientific knowledge is tentative but durable.
“Where”	This story is about the geographical discoveries era. The story tries to answer how some of the notable explorers discovered the world.	Science demands and relies on empirical evidence. Scientists can have different ideas about the same topic. Scientific knowledge is tentative but durable.
“Like Gold”	This story tells us how chemistry as a field of science emerged from alchemy.	Science demands and relies on empirical evidence. Scientific knowledge is tentative but durable.

Teaching Process

The first phase of our ongoing attempts to deal with lack of attention to science class and a comprehensive view of NOS took eight hours. At the beginning of the first class, a short discussion was established to elicit the students’ prior knowledge about science and NOS. The following questions were used to start the class discussions:

§ What does it mean to do science? Why are people interested in science?

§ What would be the characteristics of a scientist?

§ Where do scientists carry out their scientific work?

After the discussions of these questions, the teacher took notes about the students’ responses. Then, she handed out booklets of stories to her class. She asked everybody to start reading the story “To Dreams” by themselves. When everybody finished reading, the teacher asked the students to summarize and tell what they understood from the story. After a few responses, the students were allowed to talked about the story and interpret each others’ ideas about it. The teacher emphasized the related tenets of NOS that were represented in the story whenever an opportunity emerged. If there was no opportunity for the teacher to talk about NOS during the discussions, she specifically addressed the elements of NOS that were apparent in the stories after the discussions. In addition, the teacher asked further elaborative questions about the stories in relation to certain aspects of NOS. At the end of the class, she asked the same questions that she had asked at the beginning and took notes regarding the changes in students’ comprehensions about the elements of NOS. Just before finishing the first class, the teacher decided to read the story with the whole class together to repeat the ideas, because she realized that a few students in the class do not ask questions when they do not understand.

During another three weeks, the stories were read by the teacher and the students. In every class, the teacher specifically addressed important points in the stories related to NOS. She designed her teaching with the intention that the students would be able to draw deductions about certain aspects of NOS while reading the stories. The students were required to summarize each story and what they had learned from it after the reading was finished. Moreover, the teacher deliberately addressed the certain aspects of NOS, especially the ‘tentative nature of scientific knowledge’ while discussing the stories. All four stories address the development and change of scientific knowledge about certain phenomenon throughout the course of history. It took four weeks to finish reading and discussing all of the stories.

Data Collection

The participant researcher, the teacher, recorded digital research journals after every class in order to describe students’ behaviors and improvements. The aim of the journals was to follow up on the effects of the changes we made during the study in line with the “reflection-in-action” idea proposed by Schön (1987). The research journals included the teacher’s observations; anecdotes; her reflections in and on practice and within and between class conversations with students; and students’ interpretations and thoughts about stories, science, scientific knowledge, scientists, and so on.

In addition, a semi-structured interview protocol with four questions was developed by the researchers in order to grasp the students’ views of NOS in a more structured way. The interview protocol was examined by an expert in science education research, and the necessary changes were made based on the suggestions. After that, semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with all members of the class. All interviews were audio-recorded in order to grasp every aspect of the students’ views.

Data Analysis

The data were gathered from two different sources; the researcher journals and the student interviews. The data from both sources were subjected to content analysis. In addition, overall class engagement for the teaching process was evaluated based on a four-point scale rubric. These hierarchical four levels were determined to describe the overall status of students’ engagement in the class; 1 as being low and 4 as being a high level of engagement. During the teaching process, the students were expected to demonstrate behaviors that are described below:

§ Showing enthusiasm to examine the stories and ask questions curiously about them;

§ Interpreting, joking and asking follow-up questions about different characters, events, situations or pictures in the stories;

§ Showing willingness to respond to the questions that the teacher asks the whole class about the scientific concepts, NOS, and the stories in general;

§ Coming up with a conclusion by interpreting events and situations in the stories;

§ Answering the questions about events and situations that take place in the stories.

As seen in Table II, the overall participation level was defined based on the frequency of the displayed behaviors and the number of students showing these behaviors. 1: low level (0 – 3 students), 2: moderate level (3 – 6 students), 3: good level (6 – 9 students), 4: high level (more than 9 students).

Table II. Student numbers to determine course participation level

Class participation level (CPL)	Number of students showing expected behaviors
1 (Low level)	0 – 3 students
2 (Moderate level)	3 – 6 students
3 (Good level)	6 – 9 students
4 (High level)	More than 9 students

In order to improve the trustworthiness of the data and the analysis process, a professor and a doctoral candidate who are experts in keeping and analyzing reflective journals oversaw this process. In addition, another science teacher read all of the teacher’s journals, and they collaboratively decided on the overall levels for each class. They had total agreement about the level of participation in all classes.

The data from the semi-structured interviews with 14 students were transcribed, and then subjected to content analysis. The students’ responses to each question were coded separately, and themes were identified based on these initial codes. The transcripts were coded again two months after the first coding (Yıldırım & Şimşek, 2006). The overlap between two separate codings was relatively high for the interviews for each story: 0.83 for “To Dreams”, 0.80 for “Restless Creatures”, 0.85 for “Where” and 0.88 for “Like Gold.”