A cautious introduction of the dialogue between science and religion into a college astronomy course provoked diverse reactions from the 340 students in the course. We studied student responses to this curricular intervention with data from the entire class and from a set of interviews of a focus group of 19 students. Approximately half of the students in the class engaged with the issue of science and religion to some extent. There were extraordinarily few negative reactions to this minor intervention. The intellectual paths taken by students who did engage the issue were very diverse; they negotiated their ways across some complex intellectual borders in their own different ways. Some of these pathways led to internal conflict in some students, but this conflict is not necessarily an obstacle to further understanding. Several students developed some rather deep understandings of the interface between science and religion. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 86:526–547, 2002; Published online in Wiley Interscience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/sce.10029

Arguments for teaching about the nature of science have been made for several decades. The most recent science education policy documents continue to assert the need for students to understand the nature of science. However, little research actually explores how students develop these understandings in the context of a specific course. We examine the growth in students' understanding about the nature of astronomy in a one-semester college course. In addition to student work collected for 340 students in the course, we also interviewed focus students three times during the course. In this article we briefly describe class data and discuss in detail how five students developed their ideas throughout the course. In particular, we show the ways in which students respond to instruction with respect to the extent to which they (a) demand and examine evidence used for justifying claims, (b) integrate scientific and religious views, and (c) distinguish between scientific and nonscientific theories.

This study explores college students' representations about the nature of theories during their enrollment in a large astronomy course with instruction designed to address a number of nature of science issues. We focus our investigation on how nine students represent their understanding of theory, how they distinguish between scientific theories and non-scientific theories, and how they reason about specific theories. Students' notions of theory were classified under four main categories: (1) hypothesis, (2) idea with evidence, (3) explanation, and (4) explanation based on evidence. Students' condition for deciding whether a given idea is a scientific theory or not were classified under six criteria: content domain, convention, evidence, mathematical content, methodology, and tentativeness. Students expressed slight levels of variation between their reasoning about scientific theories in general and specific theories they learned in the course. Despite increased sophistication in some students' representations, this study affirms the complex dimensions involved in teaching and assessing student understanding about theories. The implications of this study underscore the need to explicitly address the nature of proof in science and issues of tentativeness and certainty students associate with scientific theories, and provide students with more opportunities to utilize the language of science.

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