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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Conclusion
As we have noted, we were unable to follow our original plan that was to explore the responses of the students who had been in Susan's class in Year 10 the year before where they had done a unit that focussed on aspects of the practice of science. However, we suggest that the responses from the total cohort provide food for thought about teaching and testing about scientific practice and the instrument developed offers ways of doing this.

We believe it is reasonable to suggest that the results of Part 2 indicate that just under a half of all the students had a reasonable understanding of the conditions under which experimental results come to be accepted by scientists. In other words, just under half of the year level cohort had a concept of science that extended beyond science as facts and included some notion of the practice of science. Yet in Part 1 when the students were asked to think about links between an article that reported a scientific finding and their Year 10 science experiences, most students considered the possibility from the point of view of content rather than process. This raises the question, "Does this mean that the way students remember school science experiences and interpret information to do with science is largely on the basis of content?" We would argue that the way science is organised and presented to students, and assessed (according to content topics), may well provide implicit messages that remembering content is what is valued and indeed that content determines the nature of the subject. As all the students in the cohort we tested had had experiences that had encouraged them to think about the way science knowledge is developed, it would seem that this message about content is a powerful one. Further to this, the need to make explicit features of the nature of science seems to be a most important aspect of science teaching that is far too easily overlooked and, by not making it explicit, perhaps encourages alternative perspectives such as the content centred conception.

As well as raising questions about the teaching of science, these findings also have implications for researchers, such as us, wishing to explore students' perceptions of science practice and science learning. In the first part of the test, which we deliberately left open ended to elicit students' true reaction, they framed their responses according to content and, as noted earlier, perhaps sought to second-guess what they thought might be expected of them. Hence, it is well to remember how the nature of the task shapes students' responses. In the second part, where we signalled the aspects of science of interest to us, students responded in ways that indicated their understanding of our intention. Consequently, the responses elicited may not in fact be complete representations of what students really think.

We have been reminded through this process how probing students' perceptions of their science experiences is indeed a complex task and how easy it can be to overlook or forget such a point when exploring the influence of science teaching on students' learning. As researchers, we had clear views about that which we sought to gain data about and our expectations were influential in shaping both our method and our understanding of the situation. Importantly though, the process we report here illustrates how we sometimes fail to see that which we carry as taken-for-granted assumptions about teaching, learning and researching teaching and learning and it is helpful to be reminded about this. Finally, despite the methodological issues that arose, the overall pencil and paper test offers insights into these students' views about the nature of science and is a reminder of the constant need to seek rather than assume, understanding of students' perspective.

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