Scientific literacy not only involves scientific content relative to each branch of science, as a scientifically literate person is also aware of what science is, as well as how it operates in a broader and complex sense. Therefore, in order to develop and implement successful methodologies in the classroom aiming to improve students’ scientific literacy, it seems crucial to know what exactly science is. However, defining science turns out to be a complex problem inside the philosophy of science, and it has even been claimed that science cannot be defined. There are several strategies to face this problem in science education. Here, we show that most of the current strategies are lists of features trying to capture the nature of science, and we also show that the kind of strategies based on lists of features have insurmountable problems. We recognise the strengths and weaknesses of two main approaches, and building from those lessons we create a tool guiding the exploration of science nature which is free of the problems identified in previous approaches.

科学素养不仅涉及与每个科学分支相关的科学内容，作为具有科学素养的人，还知道科学是什么，以及它在更广泛和复杂的意义上是如何运作的。因此，为了在课堂上开发和实施旨在提高学生科学素养的成功方法，了解科学到底是什么似乎至关重要。然而，定义科学却是科学哲学内部的一个复杂问题，甚至有人声称科学是无法定义的。在科学教育中，有几种策略可以解决这个问题。在这里，我们展示了当前大多数策略都是试图捕捉科学本质的特征列表，我们还展示了基于特征列表的策略具有无法克服的问题。