Avoiding De-Natured Science: Activities that Promote Understandings of the Nature of Science

In spite of a renewed interest in establishing the nature of science as a major element of the science cumculum we fear that the current reform emphasis relative to the nature of science (NOS) will have as little impact as earlier efforts. It seems that two critical omissions noted in previous reform efforts are again apparent. There has not been a concerted effort to communicate clearly what is meant by the NOS and how a functional understanding of this crucial aspect of science can be communicated to K-12 students (Lederman & Niess, 1997). The focus of this chapter is to address this second issue by providing strategies to communicate important aspects of the nature of science to students in a hands-on fashion. As far as communicating proper understandings of the NOS to students is concerned, teachers have been led to believe that their students will come to understand the NOS simply through the performance of scientific inquiry and/or investigations. This advice is no more valid than assuming that students will learn the details of cellular respiration by watching an animal breathe. Too many students and teachers believe that scientific knowledge is provable in an absolute sense, objective, and devoid of creativity and human imagination. It is also just as common for students and teachers to believe that laws are theories that have been proven and that there exists a single step-wise scientific method which characterizes scientific investigations (Lederman, 1992). It is highly unlikely that students and their teachers will come to understand that science is tentative, empirically-based, partly the product of human imagination and creativity, and is influenced by social and cultural factors solely through learning about the content of science or its processes. We believe that a concerted effort on the part of science educators and teachers to explicitly guide learners in their attempts to develop proper understandings of the nature of the scientific enterprise is essential. The notion of explicitness is imperative. It is critical that we target teaching the NOS if the desired impact on learners’ conceptions is to be achieved.