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Asia-Pacific Forum on Science
Learning and Teaching, Volume 4, Issue 1, Article 1 (Jun., 2003) John LOUGHRAN, Amanda BERRY, Pamela MULHALL and Dick GUNSTONE Teaching and testing about the Nature of Science: problems in attempting to determine students' perceptions
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Introduction
There are many views about the way in which science should be taught in schools and one ever present discussion deals with the place of laboratory work within the curriculum (Tamir, 1991; Hodson, 1990; Hofstein, 1988).
Some have suggested that laboratory activities offer students opportunities to work like scientists and the notion of high school science students 'working like scientists' has long been valued by various science educators. An alternative view is that laboratory work more often that not offers students an opportunity to verify the work of scientists as opposed to working like scientists. Relevant to both these views is that students may experience difficulty in abstracting from their school context to envisage their work as something other than school work, such that their understanding of doing science through laboratory work may be limited by the fact their experiences occur in the context of schooling.
Another (albeit less common) purpose for practical work is to help students learn about the way in which scientific knowledge is produced. Recent research into high school students' views about the nature of scientific enquiry (Driver, Leach, Miller and Scott 1996), reveals little evidence of students' consideration of the processes by which knowledge claims in science are made. A commonly held student view reported in Driver et al's study is that science knowledge is secure and reliable. Ways in which individual facts are checked or challenged within the scientific community before becoming accepted knowledge was not found to be part of these students' picture of the way science is carried out.
As one component of a longitudinal study exploring the relationship between science content and science process (Berry et al., 1999a), we examined how teachers' attempts to help students better understand the role of laboratory work as a way of illustrating how science knowledge is shared and validated (Hart et al, 1998). For us, this research was interesting in demonstrating the impact of teaching with this kind of purpose (the idea of illustrating how science knowledge is shared and validated) on students' ability to understand the practice of science.
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