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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Exploring the dynamic interplay of college students' conceptions of the nature of science

Ke-Sheng CHAN

College of Liberal Education
Shu-Te University
TAIWAN

E-mail: kesheng@mail.stu.edu.tw

Received 17 August, 2005
Revised 12 December, 2005

Contents

Abstract

This study attempts to determine whether there exists a negative interconnection between the creative and testable nature-of-science (NOS) conceptions in college students' conceptual ecology by investigating, through a pair of IHV-assisted teaching experiments, the effect of raising the status of each NOS conception in students' conceptual ecology on that of the other. 216 Taiwanese college non-science majors enrolled in two separate sections of an introductory general science course were randomly assigned to the two treatment groups of the study. During the 12-week experiments, students in each group were "treated" with a common core curriculum interspersed with a set of Interactive Historical Vignettes (IHVs) that highlight the particular aspect of NOS under investigation. Pretest and posttest measures of students' NOS views were collected by administering the Chinese version of the Nature of Scientific Knowledge Scale before and immediately after the experiments. The dependent t-test was used to evaluate the research hypotheses of both experiments. Results confirm that there is indeed a negative, seesawing-at-a- distance type of interconnection between the creative and testable NOS conceptions in college students' conceptual ecology. The cause for such phenomena remains open to further investigation.

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