an innovative approach

democratic view, that the understanding is also needed for participation in the
decision-making process of socio-scientific issues. The third and fourth rationales are
concerned with cultural and moral views. The nature of science brings them an
appreciation of science as a major achievement of culture, and to be aware of science
particularly in norms of the scientific community respectively. The final rationale, a
science learning view, is that the nature of science can support students’ learning of
scientific content. An additional suggestion of McComas, Clough and Almazroa
(1998: 11-14) is that by teaching with a firm understanding of the nature of science, in
particular, the process of historical scientific conceptual development might be a
possible solution for the problem of resistance to conceptual changes in learning.
Matthews (1997, 1998) argued that including the nature of science in science teaching
should also recognize epistemological educational issues, e.g. the creation versus
science debates, multicultural science, feminist critiques of contemporary science and
feminist proposals for the reform of science programmes.
3. Students’ Understanding of the Nature of Science
In 1991 – 1993, Driver et al. (1996) aimed to investigate students’ ideas about
the nature of science based on the Science National Curriculum for England and
Wales, through an eleven-series research project, titled The Development of Pupils’
Understanding of the Nature of Science. Here a cross-age study was designed using
9, 12 and 16 year-old student samples. The nature of science was characterized in
three features: the purposes of scientific work, the nature of status of scientific
knowledge, and science as a social enterprise. Stimulus materials and tasks related to
the features were given and semi-structured interviews were used with pairs of the
students to probe their ideas. In the case of the purpose of scientific work, the
findings of Driver et al. showed that science was understood as providing solutions to
technical problems rather than providing powerful explanation. Science was a
physical and a biological phenomenon, not a social phenomenon. Younger students
thought science in school was different from science in everyday life. The nature and
status of scientific knowledge was viewed as complex that combines scientific
inquiry, the status of theories and explanation, and coordination of explanation and
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