Abstract
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.
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Notes
For a review on the relevance of science education, see Aikenhead (2003), specially pages 15–26.
For a review on the problem of demarcation, see Hansson (2017).
The six demarcation criteria identified are as follows: a research programme, an epistemic field, a theory, a problem or question, or a particular inquiry. The author claim that ‘It is probably fair to say that demarcation criteria can be meaningfully applied on each of these levels of description. A much more difficult problem is whether one of these levels is the fundamental level to which assessments on the other levels are reducible.’(Hansson 2017).
Consensus NOS has been also criticised by stressing that the list might work as a ‘mantra’ or a ‘catechism’, discouraging critical thinking (Clough 2007) or arguing that it might lead to epistemic relativism (Romero-Maltrana et al. 2019), but such criticism is of another sort, they question the consequences and benefits of implementing ‘consensus NOS’ in contrast to the expected goals of scientific literacy.
Abd-El-Khalick et al. (1998) argue for an exhaustive preparation on nature of science topics for preservice teachers. Note that if the list of features increases without clear limit, then the goal of exhaustive preparation is untenable. However, the goal of preparing pre-service teachers about the nature of science is feasible if never ending lists of propositional knowledge are avoided, which is the strategy followed here.
We believe it should be stressed that the family resemblance approach (FRA) does not provide a demarcation criterion for distinguishing it from non-scientific activities. In fact, Dijk has pointed out that FRA implies that no general criterion for demarcating science is available (Dijk 2011, p. 1094).
Note that this problem is not exclusive to the consensus view, the extension of FRA done by Erduran and Dagher (2014) is essentially an inclusion of the social, political and financial constraints that are unavoidable in any sufficiently complex endeavour.
Note that Irzik and Nola (2011) included the category ‘Values’ jointly with the category ‘Aims’. It can be argued that ‘values’ are important enough to have a category by themselves as del Mar Aragón-Méndez et al. (2018) would suggest. In fact, Khun demarcated different activities through different sets of ‘values’ (Kuhn 1970). However, it can also be argued that values are items inside certain meta-categories depending on the human endeavour analysed, e.g. moral codes are products of religion, but they also serve as methods to human health medicine, and as an aim to human rights policies. Therefore, in our approach, values are not considered an independent meta-category.
There is an important difference between Irzik and Nola’s approach and that of Erduran and Dagher. The categories proposed by Irzik and Nola aim to capture the nature of science from within, whereas the three categories proposed by Erduran and Dagher are external constraints that certainly influence the endeavour, but do not distinguish it from others.
Paradigms are stable sets of features characterising periods of normal development of science, with well established: methods of theoretical and experimental research, communities of participants, knowledge about what has to be measured and how, reference books that are used in the instruction of new participants. Any case or anecdote related to the scientific endeavour that contains all the elements of the ‘paradigm matrix’ can safely be considered as a mature and representative example.
The use of cases to promote NOS learning is not exclusive to this proposal. According to (del Mar Aragón-Méndez et al. 2018, p.4) the case study, specifically the use of socio-scientific issues, is ‘the most appropriate context for learning NOS, among scientific inquiry and History of Science (HOS)’. The socio-scientific issues are a special type of a case study, and the HOS is, precisely, the consideration of historically relevant events and processes to learn about NOS.
This article aim to set the conceptual basis for future empirical studies assessing this tool. For such future works, teaching-learning sequences has to be created and implemented, but this lay beyond the scope of this article.
Data from 2013, see https://en.unesco.org/unesco_science_report/figures, page visited on Jun 2019.
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Romero-Maltrana, D., Duarte, S. A New Way to Explore the Nature of Science: Meta-categories Rather Than Lists. Res Sci Educ 52, 239–257 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-020-09940-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-020-09940-y