Over the past two decades a number of studies have examined learners’ and teachers’ conceptions of NOSI within the context of teacher instructional practices (Lucas & Roth, 1996; Martin, 1999; Ryder & Leach, 2000; Ryder, Leach, & Driver, 1999; Tomkins & Tunnicliffe, 2001; Tsai, 1999, 2003b). Links between learners’ views of the NOSI and their laboratory learning have been demonstrated (Tiberghien, Veillard & Le Marechal et al., 2002; Tsai, 1999). To a very large extend, learners’ experiences and actions during scientific investigations are influenced by the instructional setting and teachers’ conceptions of the scientific process and enterprise (Adyniz, Baksa & Skinner, 2010; Gibson & Chase, 2002; Hodson, 1993; Tiberghien et al., 2002). One finding recurring in most of these studies is that learners revealed that the translation of NOSI conceptions into instructional practice was constrained by such factors as: teachers viewing NOSI conception as less important than other curriculum goals, teachers discomfort with their own NOSI conceptions, teachers’ preoccupation with management and routine chores, and lack of resources and experience for teaching the NOSI (Duschl & Wright, 1989; Gess-
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Newsome & Lederman, 1995b; Lederman, 1999, 2007b). Accepting that the interaction between NOSI conception and instructional practice is a complex one, Abd-El-Khalick et al. (1998) recommended that development of preservice teachers NOSI understandings and learning to teach about the NOSI should be done separately. Their study however did not specifically examine the interaction between teachers NOSI conceptions and their practice of inquiry in laboratory instruction. What follows is a critical appraisal of some examples of studies done in this field.
Adyniz, Baksa & Skinner (2010) investigated scientific inquiry experiences in authentic settings and their influences of high school learners’ conceptions of the nature of science and nature of scientific inquiry. Adyniz et al. (2010) collected data through an open-ended questionnaire. They found that most of the participating learners have some conceptions of NOSI as they were able to differentiate between evidence and data; observation and experimentation. The participating learners also showed an understanding that scientists use multiple methods when solving problems. They also held a sophisticated understanding about the tentative nature of science. These results are consistent with an earlier study by Lederman (2007b) but are different from the study by Liang et al. (2006). Adyniz et al. (2010) and Lederman (2007b) argue that the naive views of NOSI held by learners originate from their lack of experiences in conducting scientific inquiry. They claimed that this happens because high school science laboratories focus only on demonstrations and experimentation aspects of the scientific inquiry, and fail to provide a context for high school learners to understand how the scientific knowledge gets generated and validated. The exploration constituting the present investigation is different from the study by Adyniz et al. in two ways. First, the current study uses a completely different instrument (Campbell, et al., 2010) which is closed to specifically examine learners’ perceptions of the nature and extend of laboratory inquiry vis-a-vis their conceptions of the NOSI. Interviews and classroom observations are used to corroborate responses to the closed instrument. Secondly, the students who took part in the present study were 16-year-old high school (Grade 11) learners in a different culture.
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In another study, Khishfe (2008) investigated the influence of two different explicit instructional approaches on improving high school learners’ understanding of the nature of science and scientific inquiry. In one group (integrated), the nature of science and scientific inquiry was explicitly taught as an integrated component of a unit on global climate change. In the other group (non-integrated), the nature of science and scientific inquiry was taught as a group of explicit activities about global warming, dispersed across the content. Based on the VNOS framework, Khishfe investigated five aspects of the nature of science and scientific inquiry: tentativeness of scientific knowledge, empirical nature of science, role of creativity and imagination in science; distinction between observation and inference; subjective nature of scientific knowledge. The results showed improvements in learners’ views of the nature of science and scientific inquiry regardless of which instructional treatment they received. Comparing the groups did not provide conclusive evidence in favour of a specific instructional method. The 7th grade learners’ thinking regarding the tentativeness of scientific theories moved from 17% having an informed view (i.e., theories can change) before explicit nature of science instruction to 44% after the instruction. This suggests that explicit instruction in the nature of scientific knowledge can promote a more sophisticated understanding among learners of the tentative nature of scientific knowledge. The author provided quotes to help the reader compare and contrast how learner thinking changed as a result of the explicit nature of science and scientific inquiry instruction. The following quotes capture the concrete way learners’ perceived scientific knowledge before the explicit instruction:
...They [scientists] haven’t actually seen it [the atom] with their eyes…then they are not certain until after they actually see it, maybe in 100 years or less”; “There’s got to be a dinosaur preserved frozen…should explore Antarctica.” (Khisfe, 2008, p.15)
The quotes that were provided to reflect the more informed learner views after explicit instruction suggest that learners had a better grasp of the revisionary aspects of scientific knowledge, despite simultaneously holding narrowly empirical notions of science, such as “seeing” leads to the certainty of scientific knowledge. The authors used the following quote to emphasize this point: “People used to think the
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Earth was flat but we know it’s not flat; we have seen pictures of the earth.” (Khisfe, 2008, p.16)
Similar findings were reported by Khishfe and Lederman (2006). Learners’ thinking regarding the tentativeness of scientific theories moved from 0% having an informed view before explicit nature of science instruction to 42% after instruction in one treatment group, and similarly from 0% to 24% after instruction in another treatment group in the study. Khishfe and Lederman (2006) provided similar quotes to typify naïve and more informed learner thinking. For instance, naïve thinking is illustrated by the following: “No, they [scientists] are not certain [about atomic structure] unless they were able to see it front of them” (Khisfe, 2008, p.19). This is contrasted with the following quote used to characterize a more informed notion of science after explicit nature of science instruction: “Yes, some scientific knowledge may change. In the future a new discovery might be found and change some of the information they’ve found” (Khisfe, 2008, p.19).
However, in both studies little effort is made to report what changed in learners’ thinking, nor to identify the common reasons they attribute as to why scientific knowledge has the capacity to change or even categorize the range of ideas learners tend to have regarding the tentativeness of scientific knowledge. With regard to their analysis and findings, the two studies should have at least addressed learners’ views maybe from a constructivist perspective, using existing notions to explicitly create learning experiences that enable learners to construct new and more sophisticated levels of critical thinking and reasoning. Furthermore, regardless of the fact that the author (s) provided some quotes and some dialogue excerpts from learner interviews to support the categorization of naïve, intermediary or informed views for each aspect; there is little to no explication of the qualitative different types of responses learners provided on the questionnaire, nor did the researchers report variations in thinking beyond naïve, intermediary or informed views during the semi-structured follow-up interviews based on context. The studies by Khisfe and Lederman (2006) and Khisfe (2008) are presented here because as a stepping off point. This current study investigates teacher and learner conceptions in relation to instructional
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practices and in the process makes reference to some misused terms such as laws are proven theories filling the gap left by the reported studies.
Lederman (1999) reports a multi- case study in which an open-ended questionnaire eliciting views related to teachers’ conceptions of the nature of science and scientific inquiry was administered to teachers. This was followed by structured and unstructured interviews, classroom observations and analysis of instructional materials to investigate the relationship between teachers’ conceptions of the nature of science and scientific inquiry and classroom practices. The study also elucidated those factors that impede or enhance the relationship. The questionnaire focused on the complexities of tentativeness in scientific knowledge, and specifically on (a) the use of human creativity and imagination in the development of scientific knowledge, (b) the subjectivity resulting from scientists’ background experiences, knowledge, and scientific paradigms, (c) the difference between scientific theory and law, (d) the importance of both observation and inference to the development of scientific knowledge, and (e) the empirical basis of scientific knowledge. One of the findings of this study was that although the teachers possessed good understandings of nature of scientific inquiry, classroom practice was not directly impacted. Lederman concluded that there was no clear relationship between teachers’ conceptions of NOS and/or NOSI and classroom practice. Overall, the study was consistent with emerging findings about the relationship between teachers’ conceptions and classroom practice as well as the research indicating the importance of explicit instructional attention to NOS and/or NOSI (Bady, 1979; Brickhouse, 1989; Brickhouse, 1990; Lederman & Druger, 1985; Lederman, 1986a; Lederman & Zeidler, 1987; Zeidler & Lederman, 1989). However, this same body of research suggests these efforts of the translation of teachers’ conceptions of NOSI into classroom practice have been met with limited success since teachers cannot teach what they do not understand (MacDonald & Rogan, 1990). This lack of consensus is a concern and this study sees it as an issue worth investigating much to the disagreement with Herron (1969) who stated, anything as complex as the nature of scientific knowledge or scientific inquiry is capable of being seen from a variety of viewpoints.
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In their study, Marchlewicz and Wink (2010) examined how undergraduate students’ views of scientific inquiry shift after introduction of the Activity Model of Inquiry in a general Chemistry course. They used essay prompts, pre- and post questionnaire and interviews to get learners views. The questionnaire (the Views of Nature of Science questionnaire Form- C by Lederman, Abd-El-Khalick, et al., 2002) that students completed probed their understandings of the “empirical, tentative, theory-laden, creative and imaginative, and social and cultural embeddedness nature of scientific knowledge, as well as, the myth of a universal scientific method, the difference between scientific laws and theories, and learners’ overall view of science” (Marchlewicz & Wink, 2010, p. 309). These were considered to be the tenets of NOSI in the present study and the rationale given for this claim was mentioned earlier in this Chapter. The results reveal that there are some shifts from a naïve view to a more informed view of nature of scientific inquiry for some learners. It can be argued that such learners whose views shifted from being naive to more informed have a better understandings of the NOSI. Even though Marchlewicz and Wink (2010) did their study with undergraduate students, their findings were similar to some researchers who did their studies with high school learners (Cuevas, Lee, Hart, & Deaktor, 2005; Domin, 1999) and primary school learners (Ackerson & Donnelly, 2010). These findings are inconsistent from a study by Abd-El-Khalick, Bell and Lederman (1998) who found that even when teachers had an adequate understanding of the NOSI, that understanding did not necessarily influence classroom practice. The exploration constituting the present investigation is different from the study by Marchlewicz and Wink (2010) in two ways. First, the current study uses a completely different instrument (Liang, et al., 2008) to specifically examine learners’ conceptions of the nature of scientific inquiry and vis-a-vis their perceptions or experiences of scientific inquiry elicited using the an instrument by Campbell et al. (2010). Secondly, the students who took part in the present study were 16- year-old high school (pre-university) learners in a different culture.
This section is concluded by reporting a study by Sampson & Grooms (2008) who used a new instructional model called an argument-driven inquiry (ADI) to determine its impact on learners’ conceptions of the nature of professional scientific inquiry (NOPSI) and the
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nature of school scientific inquiry (NOSSI) using the views of scientific inquiry (VOSI) questionnaire before and after an eighteen week intervention. The intervention consisted of fifteen lessons that were designed using the argument-driven inquiry model. An analysis of learner responses to VOSI items before and after the invention indicates that the instructional model did affect some change on learners’ views of NOPSI but not to the degree expected or desired. The results also suggest that the ways learners conceptualize key aspects of science or struggle to articulate their ideas about science seem to act as a barrier to the development of an appropriate understanding of NOPSI. Despite an explicit and authentic approach to instruction meaning that science teachers made the nature of scientific inquiry in professional science clear to students (Abd-El-Khalick & Lederman, 2000a; Khishfe & Abd-El-Khalick, 2002) while at the same time engaging them in realistic scientific practices inside the classroom (such as inquiry, argumentation, writing, and peer review) so that the nature of scientific inquiry made sense in the context of their own work (Kuhn & Reiser, 2006; Sandoval & Reiser, 2004), these learners’ conceptions of the nature of science changed very little. This is consistent with findings from the study by Abd-El- Khalick, Bell and Lederman (1998). The current study does not have an intervention but instead utilizes semi-structured interviews and classroom observations; and it will be interesting to find out if these findings hold to the South African context. There seems to be a critical factor that is missing. Sampson & Grooms (2008) propose, based on the results of their study, that more focused attention must be paid to the development of learners’ declarative knowledge and the difficulties that learners face when asked to articulate their ideas. This study deviates from this recommendation since it does not involve an intervention but instead focuses on the functional (interpretive) analysis of learners’ ideas.
2.11 Conclusion
This chapter provided an overview of the science education research literature related to the nature of scientific inquiry. It explained that a central and reoccurring element of science education reform efforts posits inquiry and the understanding of the nature of scientific inquiry as essential cogs that extend beyond the mere development of process skills. Such skills include; observing, inferring, classifying, predicting, measuring, questioning,
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interpreting and analyzing data. Precipitating concepts that form the conceptual framework were reviewed from a historical, philosophical, pedagogical exploratory and analytical manner. A review of research that focuses on curricular and assessments efforts aimed at improving learner and teacher views of the NOSI suggests that scientific inquiry includes the traditional science processes, but also refers to the combining of these processes with scientific knowledge, scientific reasoning and critical thinking to develop scientific knowledge. The findings of specific research related to this study, including the particular aspects of nature of scientific inquiry this work addresses, were reviewed in detail. The following chapter describes the research design and methodology, including the sample of teachers and learners and the instruments used to collect data and data analysis procedures.
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