003_General Problem of teaching the Nature of Science (NOS).

General Problem of teaching the NOS

1. NOS is isolated unit
2. Taught in early school
3. Ignore to fix misconceptions
4. Conceptual change requires time and efforts
5. NOS – ideas overlap
6. More than just memorize the NOS, Student needs to connect the NOS to historical and contemporary scientific issues.

NOS instruction should not be indoctrination. It should be questioning to investigation.

Strategies: asking questions
Abd-ElKhalick and Lederman (2000): Historical examples or Inquiry
Clogh (2006): decontextualized to highly contextualized activities

Effective NOS instruction demands:
NOS are part of instruction
Student’s attention must be explicitly drawn to NOS ideas
Students must be mentally engaged and reflect
Decontextualized to highly contextualized activities
Closely monitoring students

Instruction Contents

Introducing the NOS to students

- Science as a problem solving endeavor – black box – making link NOS concept
- Comparing to Real world

- Addressing the NOS during content instruction

- Long-term conceptual change – classroom activities are modified to promote NOS ideas: posing questions to generate discussion
- Connect to previous decontextualized activities
The use of words such as prove, tell, discover – provide evidences for, interpret, developed the idea
- Addressing inaccurate NOS ideas in textbook
- Providing historical and contemporary examples of science
- Putting it all together: gestalt drawing – without difficult contents to worry

Assessing Student Understanding

Test, open-ended, research
Ongoing: Tentative (NOS)

Final thoughts

- The NOS understanding shows improvement of student
Teacher has no time
- The NOS should be integrated throughout the entire year: decontextualize, contextualize, and high contextualize
- Teacher works to draw attention of NOS continually

- Students should see science as more than verification and memorisation of facts. – scientific literate individual

- Strategies and activities for teaching the NOS are useful, but we must understand that difficulties in conceptual change cannot be addressed with only isolated NOS activities.
- Extensive, explicit, accurate and sustained NOS instruction is necessary.