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Asia-Pacific
Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 6, Issue 2, Article 8
(Dec., 2005) Ke-Sheng CHAN Exploring the dynamic interplay of college students' conceptions of the nature of science
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Asia-Pacific
Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 6, Issue 2, Article 8
(Dec., 2005) Ke-Sheng CHAN Exploring the dynamic interplay of college students' conceptions of the nature of science
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Introduction and Background
Helping all students develop a basic understanding about the nature of science (NOS) is a common goal of contemporary science education reform worldwide (DES/Welsh Office, 1995; Ministry of Education, 2001; National Research Council, 1996; Rutherford & Ahlgren, 1990). However, recent research consistently shows that most students do not possess an adequate understanding of the nature of science (Chin, 2002; Lederman, 1992; Meichtry, 1993; Solomon, 1994). To improve the situation, many researchers recommended using the history of science to help students develop more accurate views about the nature of science (Duschl, 1990; Hsu & Lee, 1995; Matthews, 1994; Monk & Osborne, 1997). However, since most science teachers today are already required to "cover" more material than time allows, they usually have no choice but to focus on teaching the required science content while leaving the development of student understanding of the nature of science to chance. The history and nature of science thus remains to be a "non-essential component" in most science courses today, serving merely as a footnote to the science curriculum (Lemke, 1990).
As an attempt to help science teachers revitalize the history and nature of science in their science classes under the practical constraints, Wandersee (1990) has recently developed an innovative educational tool – Interactive Historical Vignettes (IHVs) – that enables science teachers to add a historical and philosophical dimension to regular science instruction with little investment in time and no reduction in content coverage. The IHVs are carefully crafted, historically accurate short stories (10-15 minutes) that describe some brief episode from the life of a scientist which characterizes certain aspects of the NOS and provides a historical perspective on the science topic under study. Developed based on Egan's (1986) story form model, the IHVs employ the interrupted story form and binary opposites involving conflict to generate student participation and spark discussion about the NOS. Its "delivery system" consists of an elegant instructional technique that combines the story-telling method with the discussion method. As shown in Figure 1, the essence of this technique involves breaking the IHV story at the point of conflict, asking students to predict its resolution, revealing the historical resolution of the conflict, and helping students refine their NOS views in follow-up classroom discussions. In recent years, Wandersee and his research associates have successfully used the IHVs to teach the nature of science in elementary, secondary, as well as college science classes (Roach, 1993; Wandersee, 1992; Wandersee & Roach, 1998). These initial successes suggest that the IHVs might also be used by science teachers in Taiwan to safely "smuggle" some history and nature of science into their science classrooms under the practical constraints.
Figure 1. Concept Map of the Interactive Historical Vignettes (Wandersee, 1992)
In order to find out whether the IHVs really can effectively enhance Taiwanese students' understanding about the nature of science, the author (Chan, 2003) recently conducted a pretest-posttest control-group design, quasi-experimental study to investigate the impact of infusing the IHVs into existing high school science courses in Taiwan on students' views of the amoral, creative, developmental, parsimonious, testable, and unified NOS summarized in Appendix I by Rubba and Andersen (1978). The results of the study not only provided conclusive evidence for the mind-altering effects of the IHVs on students' NOS views, but also uncovered by accident an intriguing phenomenon that demands further investigation. Namely, while the creative and testable NOS conceptions were considered consistent in Rubba and Andersen's (1978) model of the nature of scientific knowledge, they seemed to be so incompatible with each other in students' conceptual ecology that they appeared to engage in a seesawing battle against each other throughout the experiment.
As the first step toward solving the mystery about the above intriguing phenomenon, the current study employed a novel research design that uses the focus of the previous study – the IHVs – as a research tool to induce conceptual change in college students' conceptions of the NOS and tried to ascertain whether there exists a negative, seesawing-at-a-distance type of interconnection between the creative and testable NOS conceptions in such students' conceptual ecology by conducting a pair of IHV-assisted "twin experiments" depicted below.
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Copyright (C) 2005 HKIEd APFSLT. Volume 6, Issue 2, Article 8 (Dec., 2005). All Rights Reserved.
