Using Explicit Teaching of Philosophy to Promote Understanding of the Nature of Science
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Using Explicit Teaching of Philosophy to Promote Understanding of the Nature of Science A Case Study from a Chinese High School Xiaoming Shi 1,2 Accepted: 20 October 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
Adopting an explicit and reflective approach to the teaching of the history and philosophy of science is useful in promoting high school students’ understanding of the nature of science. Whereas the history of science is usually signposted clearly in the school science curriculum, the philosophy of science is considered to be embedded in and integral to science education. This article argues that philosophical topics also need to be explicitly signposted and discussed in the teaching of the nature of science in high schools. This study investigates an interdisciplinary course on the nature of science in a Chinese senior high school. The course involved explicit teaching of philosophy of science topics with subject knowledge in each lesson. This mixed method design of the research included a modified version of the Views on Science, Technology and Society questionnaire as reported by Aikenhead and Ryan (Science Education, 76(5):477‑491, 1992) and phenomenographical analysis. Although the sample size is small, the results suggest that explicit teaching of philosophy of science topics helps students better understand both the nature of science and the relationship between science, technology and society.
1 Introduction In recent decades, there has been broad agreement that teaching about the nature of science (NOS) is a crucial part of school science education (McComas 2006; Lederman 2013; Clough and Olson 2008). Lederman and Lederman (2019) define NOS as concerned with the characteristics of scientific knowledge, about how science develops, which is fundamentally different from scientific inquiry and scientific knowledge. Although there are divergent definitions of the NOS (Hodson and Wong 2017), there is some consensus on the topics and skills K-12 students should be encouraged to develop. These include tentativeness and creativity, an understanding of objectivity and subjectivity, scientific theory and law, the social and cultural embeddedness of science and skills in observation and inference (McComas and Olson 1998; Lederman and Lederman 2019). * Xiaoming Shi [email protected] 1
School of Education and English, University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China
2
Ningbo Xiaoshi High School, Ningbo, China
X. Shi
In recent years, the NOS has been reflected in the syllabuses of various countries (Olson 2018), including the “Next Generation Science Standards” in the USA (McComas and Nouri 2016), “Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI)” in the EU (Laherto et al. 2018) and the recent reform of the science curriculum in China (Yao and Guo 2018; Li et al. 2018). However, how to teach students about the NOS has always been a problematic issue. Research shows that adopting explicit and reflective pedagogical approaches is effective in teaching the history and philosophy of science (HPS) (Matthews 2017; C
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