Excerpts from past student’s assignment one (Merit)

How is the nature of science taught in secondary schools?

With no clear consensus on the meaning of the nature of science (NOS) (Lederman 2007), it
can be difficult to fully understand how NOS can be incorporated in science lessons.
Lederman (2007: 833) defines NOS as “a way of knowing, or the values and beliefs inherent
to scientific knowledge and its development”. He states that NOS is not the same as
scientific process or inquiry. Rather, NOS is the “epistemological underpinnings of the
activities of science and the characteristics of the resulting knowledge” (Lederman, 2007:
835). This means that NOS can be looked at as a ‘scientific way of knowing’ that
incorporates curiosity and creativity, and “should feature a combination of process and
product” (McComas, 2017: 71) through the concept of ‘working scientifically’. Despite
ambiguity surrounding NOS, Lederman (2007) emphasises its importance, and suggests
science teachers incorporate NOS in science lessons to reinforce the scientific concepts
being taught. This is further supported by McComas (2017: 71), who reiterates that NOS is
“perhaps the most essential element to include in science instruction”.

At my placement school, incorporating aspects of ‘working scientifically’ differs from

teacher to teacher within the science department. For some teachers, the concept of
‘working scientifically’ is strictly only connected to the act of completing a practical. In these
instances, students are encouraged to use experimental skills and conduct investigations,
thereby fulfilling the requirements of the NC (DfE 2014). Practicals are therefore considered
an essential part of science teaching, with many teachers regarding them as “the basic
modus operandi for the teaching of science” (Abrahams, 2011: 58). However, they are not
always useful teaching techniques. This is because practical work becomes routine for
science teachers, leading them to be unable to critically assess the impact they have made
on pupil progress or on students achieving the outcomes of the lesson (Abrahams, 2011).
Research has shown that students do not always learn lesson outcomes during a practical
based lesson. While it seems that they can remember brief details of the practical task, they
are often not able to explain what they learned from it or why they did it (Abrahams, 2011).
So although practical work “seems the ‘natural’ and ‘right’ thing to do” (Millar, 2002: 53), it
arguably “only has a strictly limited role to play in learning science” (Osborne, 1998: 1756).

From my own experience, I’ve noticed how eager and enthusiastic my students are during
practical lessons. They are keen to be scientists, in the most literal sense – to don their lab
coats and make discoveries. While using practicals to illustrate the main concepts of
‘working scientifically’ is, on the whole, positive and useful, it can be argued that certain
NOS skills, such as understanding how scientific theories and methods develop over time,
are lacking from such practical based lessons. Claxton (1997: 73) argues that “the generation
of ideas through hunches, analogies and intuitions is as essential to science as the
extrapolation and testing of them”, thereby emphasising the idea that a mixture of NOS and
practical skills lessons are the most useful. In my own teaching practice, I have attempted to
incorporate NOS in my Year 8 lessons on space. In these lessons, I introduced scientific laws
and theories, with respect to the geocentric and heliocentric model of the solar system, and
allowed my students to suggest what they thought these concepts meant and how
significant they were to the scientific community at the time. As expected, students believed
that theories were abstract and not based on facts, and they did not recognise that theories
are developed over time.