Nature of Science Progression in School Year 1–9: a Case Study of Teachers’ Suggestions and Rationales

Abstract

The inclusion of nature of science (NOS) in science education has for a long time been regarded as crucial. There is, however, a lack of research on appropriate NOS aspects for different educational levels. An even more neglected area of research is that focusing on teachers' perspectives on NOS teaching at different levels. The aim of this article is to examine NOS progression in the light of teachers' suggestions and rationales. In order to obtain teachers' informed perspectives, we chose to involve six teachers (teaching grades 1-9) in a 3-year research project. They took part in focus group discussions about NOS and NOS teaching as well as implemented jointly planned NOS teaching sessions. Data that this article builds on was collected at the end of the project. The teachers' suggestions for NOS progression often relied on adding more NOS issues at every stage, thereby creating the foundations of a broader but not necessarily deeper understanding of NOS. Five rationales, for if/when specific NOS issues are appropriate to introduce, emerged from the analysis of the teacher discussions. Some of these rationales, including practice makes perfect and increasing levels of depth can potentially accommodate room for many NOS issues in the science classroom, while maturity and experience instead has a restricting effect on NOS teaching. Also, choice of context and teaching approaches play an important role in teachers' rationales for whether specific NOS issues should be included or not at different stages. The article discusses the implications for teacher education and professional development.

The status of and challenges facing secondary science teaching in Tanzania: a focus on inquiry-based science teaching and the nature of science

“…It is generally agreed that IBST cannot be achieved if students are not helped to acquire informed views of NOS (Billingsley & Fraser, 2018;Das et al, 2019;Fernandes et al, 2018;Herman et al, 2019;Leden & Hansson, 2019;Lederman et al, 2002). This is because views of NOS have been found to influence how science is conducted, accepted and interpreted (Das et al, 2019;Lederman et al, 2013;Liang et al, 2008;Temel et al, 2018).…”

Eliciting the Views of Prospective Elementary and Preschool Teachers about the Nature of Science

“…Several elements of NOS concepts have already been integrated to science education curricula at all grade levels by developed countries. However, there are only a limited number of research studies uncovering NOS conceptions of younger children, especially at pre-K level and identifying the most suitable components of NOS for different grade levels (Bell & Clair, 2015;Leden & Hansson, 2017).…”

From black and white to shades of grey

“…Challenges connected to NOS teaching have been thoroughly investigated and has contributed explanations as to why there is a perceived gap between research intentions and classroom practice (e.g., Abd-El-Khalick et al 1998;Akerson and Hanuscin 2007;Brickhouse and Bodner 1992;Clough and Olson 2012;Lakin and Wellington 1994;Hodson 1993;Höttecke and Silva 2011;Leden et al 2015;Lederman 1995). In other articles (Leden et al 2015;Leden and Hansson 2017), we have reported on, and argued that, teachers' perspectives constitute an important part in the attempt to understand and examine this gap further. In the present study, we continue our exploration of teachers' perspectives.…”

“…For a detailed description of these teachers' discussion of age-appropriate NOS teaching, see Leden and Hansson (2017).…”