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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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Research Design and Methodology
In order to ascertain whether there is indeed a negative, seesawing-at-a-distance type of relationship between the creative and testable nature-of-science conceptions in college students' conceptual ecology, a pair of IHV-assisted "twin experiments" depicted below were conducted to investigate the following pair of research questions:
- Does raising the status of the creative NOS conception in college students' conceptual ecology cause the status of the testable NOS conception to drop lower simultaneously?
- Does raising the status of the testable NOS conception in college students' conceptual ecology cause the status of the creative NOS conception to drop lower simultaneously?
1 2 A total of 216 Taiwanese college non-science majors enrolled in two separate sections of an introductory general science course taught by the author participated this study. Each section was randomly assigned to one of the two treatment groups of the study: the creative group and the testable group. During the 12-week teaching experiments, students in each group were "treated" with a common core curriculum interspersed with a series of specially designed IHVs that highlight the particular aspect of the NOS under investigation. In Experiment 1, a 15-minute IHV featuring the creative NOS was injected into the creative section of the course once every two weeks for 12 weeks. In a similar manner, a testable IHV was infused into the testable section every other week during the 12-week treatment period in Experiment 2. Appendix II shows a typical creative IHV used in this study.
Student views of the creative and testable NOS were measured by the Chinese version of Nature of Scientific Knowledge Scale (CNSKS) translated and validated by the author for use with Taiwanese students in a previous study (Chan, 2003). The CNSKS is a 48-item Likert-type instrument with 6 subscales designed to measure secondary and college student' views of the amoral, creative, developmental, parsimonious, testable and unified NOS summarized in Rubba & Andersen (1978). Each subscale contains 8 items and can be used separately to measure the status of the corresponding NOS conception in students' conceptual ecology. Table I summarizes the reliability of each CNSKS subscale obtained in this study.
Subscale
No. of Items
Range of Scores
CNSKS Alpha (N=216)
Amoral
8
8-40 (Neutral:24)
0.76
Creative
8
8-40 (Neutral:24)
0.82
Developmental
8
8-40 (Neutral:24)
0.65
Parsimonious
8
8-40 (Neutral:24)
0.62
Testable
8
8-40 (Neutral:24)
0.70
Unified
8
8-40 (Neutral:24)
0.78
Table 1 Reliabilities of CNSKS Subscales
Pretest and posttest measures of students' NOS views were collected by administering the CNSKS before and immediately after the 12-week teaching experiments. The dependent t-test statistical procedure was used to analyze the data and evaluate the following pair of research hypotheses, using an alpha value of 0.05 for all statistical tests.
- Raising the status of the creative NOS conception in college students' conceptual ecology causes the status of the testable NOS conception to drop lower simultaneously.
- Raising the status of the testable NOS conception in college students' conceptual ecology causes the status of the creative NOS conception to drop lower simultaneously.
Copyright (C) 2005 HKIEd APFSLT. Volume 6, Issue 2, Article 8 (Dec., 2005). All Rights Reserved.
