In addition to considering sociocultural, political, economic, and ethical factors, effectively engaging socioscientific issues requires that students understand and apply scientific explanations and the nature of science. Promoting such understandings can be achieved through immersing students in authentic real-world contexts where the SSI impacts occur and teaching those students about how scientists comprehend, research, and debate those SSI. This triangulated mixed-methods investigation explored how 60 secondary students’ trophic cascade explanations changed through their experiencing place-based SSI instruction focused on the Yellowstone (...) wolf reintroduction, including scientists’ work and debates regarding that issue. Furthermore, this investigation determined the association between the students’ post place-based SSI instruction trophic cascade explanations and NOS views. Findings from this investigation demonstrate that through the place-based SSI instruction students’ trophic cascade explanations became significantly more accurate and complex and included more ecological causal mechanisms. Also, significant and moderate to moderately large correlations were found between the accuracy and contextualization of students’ post place-based SSI instruction NOS views and the complexity of their trophic cascade explanations. Empirical substantiation of the association between the complexity of students’ scientific explanations and their NOS views responds to an understudied area in the science education research. It also encourages the consideration of several implications, drawn from this investigation’s findings and others’ prior work, which include the need for NOS to be forefront alongside and in connection with science content in curricular standards and through instruction focused on relevant and authentic place-based SSI. (shrink)

This inaugural handbook documents the distinctive research field that utilizes history and philosophy in investigation of theoretical, curricular and pedagogical issues in the teaching of science and mathematics. It is contributed to by 130 researchers from 30 countries; it provides a logically structured, fully referenced guide to the ways in which science and mathematics education is, informed by the history and philosophy of these disciplines, as well as by the philosophy of education more generally. The first handbook to cover the (...) field, it lays down a much-needed marker of progress to date and provides a platform for informed and coherent future analysis and research of the subject. -/- The publication comes at a time of heightened worldwide concern over the standard of science and mathematics education, attended by fierce debate over how best to reform curricula and enliven student engagement in the subjects There is a growing recognition among educators and policy makers that the learning of science must dovetail with learning about science; this handbook is uniquely positioned as a locus for the discussion. -/- The handbook features sections on pedagogical, theoretical, national, and biographical research, setting the literature of each tradition in its historical context. Each chapter engages in an assessment of the strengths and weakness of the research addressed, and suggests potentially fruitful avenues of future research. A key element of the handbook’s broader analytical framework is its identification and examination of unnoticed philosophical assumptions in science and mathematics research. It reminds readers at a crucial juncture that there has been a long and rich tradition of historical and philosophical engagements with science and mathematics teaching, and that lessons can be learnt from these engagements for the resolution of current theoretical, curricular and pedagogical questions that face teachers and administrators. (shrink)

Inquiry teaching can be viewed as an approach for communicating the knowledge and practices of science to learners. In its various forms inquiry offers potential learning opportunities and poses constraints on what might be available to learn. Philosophical analysis offers ways of understanding inquiry, knowledge, and social practices. This chapter will examine philosophical problems that arise from teaching science as inquiry. Observation, experimentation, measurement, inference, explanation, and modeling pose challenges for novice learners who may not have the conceptual and epistemic (...) knowledge to engage effectively in such scientific practices in inquiry settings. Science learning entails apprenticeship and socialization into a legacy of conceptual knowledge and epistemic practices (Kelly. Inquiry, Activity, and Epistemic Practice. In R. Duschl & R. Grandy (Eds.) Teaching Scientific Inquiry: Recommendations for Research and Implementation (pp. 99–117; 288–291). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2008). Modern science increasingly relies on abstract and computational models that are not readily constructed from the student-driven questions that often function as an early step in inquiry approaches to instruction. Thus, engaging students in the epistemic practices of science poses challenges for educators. -/- The argument developed in this chapter draws from an epistemological position that makes clear the need for building from extant disciplinary knowledge of a relevant social group in order to learn through inquiry. Establishing a social epistemology in educational settings provides opportunities for students to engage in ways of speaking, listening, and explaining that are part of constructing knowledge claims in science (Kelly and Chen. Journal of Research in Science Teaching 36, 883–915, 1999). This perspective on epistemology emphasizes the importance of dialectical processes in science learning. Thus, an inquiry-oriented pedagogy needs to attend to developing norms and practices in educational settings that provide opportunities to learn through and about inquiry. By considering the situated social group as the epistemic subject, inquiry teaching and learning can be viewed as creating opportunities for supporting the conceptual, epistemic, and social goals of science education (Duschl. Review of Research in Education, 32, 268–291, 2008; Kelly. Inquiry, Activity, and Epistemic Practice. In R. Duschl & R. Grandy (Eds.) Teaching Scientific Inquiry: Recommendations for Research and Implementation (pp. 99–117; 288–291). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2008). -/- The chapter addresses the philosophical considerations of inquiry in science education by identifying the epistemological constraints to teaching science as inquiry, reviewing the potential contributions of philosophy of science to discussions regarding inquiry, considering how social epistemology aligns with developments in psychology of learning with understandings about science, and offering ways that philosophical analysis can contribute to the on-going conversations regarding science education reform. (shrink)