Teaching and testing about the Nature of Science: problems in attempting to determine students' perceptions

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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Context of the study
As briefly noted above, this research was one aspect of a three-year longitudinal study exploring the relationship between science content and science process. Through this research we spoke with a number of science teachers and students about school science teaching and learning. At one school site (an all girls' Catholic College in which the data from this paper is drawn) we were fortunate to work with two science teachers who were continually evaluating and redefining their understanding of the relationship between their teaching and their students' learning. One of the teachers, Alice (pseudonym) taught year 9 and 10 science at the school, while the other teacher, Susan (pseudonym) taught year 10 science and year 11 and 12 physics. The belief that there was a need to continually push students to learn about science in ways other than the stereotypical 'science as facts' was an important part of both of these teachers' thinking and classroom practice and certainly caught our attention as researchers.

Through their curriculum organisation and their teaching practice, it was clear to us as observers that Alice and Susan were attempting to help their students better understand science in ways that were perhaps not so common in other science classes with which we were familiar. For example, the science curriculum was modified so that more time could be spent exploring fewer concepts in a variety of ways, problem solving tasks were common so that students' science knowledge and skills would be called upon to interpret and solve science problems, and laboratory work was specifically designed to challenge the 'recipe' approach (eg. students simply following the laboratory procedure without thinking about what they are doing or why). As a part of this challenge to the recipe approach, Susan had designed a unit of work for her year 10 class specifically around the way in which knowledge claims in science are validated. In this unit, students were asked to select one experiment from a large selection of experiments, conduct the experiment, record their results and then document their approach in such a way that another group of students could duplicate their work. This procedure was an attempt to help students come to understand an important component of scientists' work and to illustrate that communicating results and having one's ideas re-tested by others is an integral part of developing, validating and accepting science knowledge (a full description of this process is available in Hart et al., 1998). One other feature of this unit was that (by coincidence) at this time Susan's student-teacher was himself a recent Doctoral graduate in Physics. In one lesson, he gave a presentation about his work and illustrated for Susan's students many aspects of science that were far from obvious to them. He explained the role of conference presentations and journal articles as well as the role of the science research community in developing and validating science knowledge claims.

As a result of the science teaching and learning apparent in this particular unit of work, but also because of the overall approach of both teachers, we were interested in exploring whether there was any lasting impact on the students' thinking about the practice of science. Our major focus was to follow up on the ways in which Susan's students were thinking about their science learning and to compare their thinking with that of other students who had not been taught the unit. Hence, attempting to 'explore' these students' understanding of the nature of science was enticing from the perspective of what we perceived as interesting approaches to science teaching. However, Susan's unit gave an extra impetus for exploring the influence of her particular teaching approach which we thought was thought provoking and different to that which we had observed in other schools at the time.

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