Exploring Representations of Nature of Science in Australian Junior Secondary School Science Textbooks

Contextualisation of factual knowledge in genetics: A pre- and post- survey of undergraduates’ understanding of the Nature of Science

“…In the FRA, we found a systematic approach to expand the general consensus view to domain-specific NOS aspects. We used FRA as a framing tool to embed domain-general NOS aspects into the socio-scientific context (Erduran & Dagher, 2014;Dagher & Erduran, 2016); Correspondingly, we emphasised the entanglement of domain-general notions claimed by the general consensus view with the FRA categories to exemplify the interconnections of the different representations of NOS aspects (McDonald, 2017). In addition, we used the FRA wheel as a visualization tool to structure science stories in a holistic and contextualized manner (see also Erduran, 2017).…”

“…After these teaching interventions, students' understanding of several NOS aspects showed an improvement (Irwin, 2000;Lin & Chen, 2002;Rudge & Howe, 2009;Paraskevopoulou & Koliopoulos, 2011;Wolfshagen & Canella, 2015). However, McDonald (2017) shows in her analysis of Australian junior secondary textbooks representations of NOS within the topic of genetics that NOS was not sufficiently explicitly addressed in the case studies. She particularly criticizes missing links and guiding questions to represent the interconnection of the different NOS aspects towards a more holistic NOS understanding (see also Campanile et al, 2015 for the example of NOS representations in the Mendelian genetics sections of U.S. high school biology textbooks).…”

“…For teaching domain-specific NOS, the FRA wheel enables a differentiated picture of science. While FRA highlights both the similarities and the differences among scientific disciplines, it provides a coherent approach to capture domain-general and domain-specific aspects of NOS at the same time (McDonald, 2017).…”

A Study on Demonstration of the Nature of Science in Science Textbooks: History and Philosophy of Science Perspectives

“…However, although they are short and not deep, their relationship between the content presentations, so with the intervention, seems bare. CONCLUSION Teaching NOS is seen as an important goal of science education (Niaz & Coştu, 2009;Niaz, 2016;McDonald & Abd-El-Khalick, 2017), and demonstration of scientific knowledge in textbooks has a crucial role in this goal (McDonald, 2017;Yang et al, 2020). Textbooks build a learning experience in a one-sided interaction and non-interactive ways but social because of the communication between the reader and the author (Kloser, 2013;Patterson et al, 2017).…”

“…Science textbooks are seen as influential teaching resources which have a substantial role in the science classroom and so it should help students develop informed conceptions of NOS because "it is most likely that the values and assumptions embedded or explicated in the language of the textbook, and its associated images, will influence students' views about the nature of the science" (McDonald & Abd-El-Khalick, 2017). Furthermore, Yang et al (2020) and McDonald (2017) stated that "how science textbooks should portray NOS aspects have been a keen interest to science educators. "…”