The Presentation of Science Practice in Twenty Historical Cases
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The Presentation of Science Practice in Twenty Historical Cases A Content Analysis of a Popular Science Book Bing Wei 1
& Yaqing Wang
1
Accepted: 15 October 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
The term “science practice” has drawn increasing attention in the current science education literature. In this study, the methodology of content analysis was adopted to examine the presentation of science practice in 20 historical cases compiled in a popular science book. Three aspects and eight categories of science practice constitute the analytical framework. As a result of the qualitative analysis, 17 meanings (sub-categories) under the eight science practices were found in the book. In the quantitative analysis, it was found that “investigating practices” was more commonly presented than “sense-making practices” and “critiquing practices” and that the most frequent are traditional practices of “planning and carrying out investigations,” “analyzing and interpreting data,” and “asking questions.” The findings are significant in providing implications for understanding the notion of science practice and for the design of educational teaching materials in promoting science practice in schools.
1 Introduction Recently, the term “science practice” has drawn much attention in the current science education literature. It represents the contemporary understanding of the nature of science (e.g., Abd-El-Khalick and Lederman 2000; Erduran and Dagher 2014; Osborne et al. 2003), which has resulted from the work of science historians, philosophers, cognitive scientists, and sociologists. In science curriculum reform, the focus on science practice can be seen as a substantial departure from previous efforts of engaging students in “inquiry” science (McNeill et al. 2018). As Pruitt (2014) observed, inquiry skills are often presented as separate from science content in many science curriculum standards, which leads to a situation that students carry out a series of hands-on activities but rarely enact these activities as a way to explore and
* Bing Wei [email protected]
1
Faculty of Education, University of Macau, Taipa, Macau, China
B. Wei, Y. Wang
explain the natural world. Moreover, inquiry-based instruction in the classroom often failed to involve students in the construction and critique of knowledge (Osborne 2014). Therefore, calling for students’ engagement in science practice represents a paradigm shift in the social and epistemic dimension of how scientific knowledge is constructed and evaluated in classrooms (Osborne 2011). In other words, this “practice turn,” termed by Ford and Forman (2006), emphasizes that students should be reflectively engaged in the work of knowledge construction and evaluation, through which they understand the epistemological tenets underlying scientific endeavor and develop scientific ideas that can be used to explain the natural world (Berland et al. 2016). The transition from “inquiry” to “practice” is reminiscent of a similar but everlasting effort in advocating the history of sc
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