an innovative approach

Which aspect of the nature of science should be emphasized as the better way
to promote understanding of the nature of science was also studied. Bell et al. (2003)
studied the impact of an eight-week apprenticeship teaching program which
emphasized scientific inquiry using authentic science experiences to develop the
students’ understandings of the nature of science in a Pacific Northwest state,
America. The ten volunteers of high-ability tenth and eleventh grade students were
selected to participate in this program during the summer time. These students had to
work actively with university scientists in a laboratory. They were required to
participate in designing research, collecting and analyzing data. The results in the
students’ pre- and post- questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews; however,
illustrated that their conceptions of the nature of scientific knowledge and scientific
inquiry had changed very little. Their understanding of the nature of scientific
enterprise had much improved. In discussion, Bell et al. claimed that the
understandings of the nature of scientific enterprise were a spontaneous outcome of
authentic science experiences such as in the laboratory, while changing the
understandings of the knowledge and the inquiry depended on a student’s
epistemology and reflected on their own actions.
Teaching the nature of science which emphasized science as a historically
social enterprise was promoted by Lin and Chen (2002). Their study was conducted
using a quasi-experimental design with a group of trainee chemistry teachers, an
experimental group of 33 senior students, and a control group of 30 junior students all
from the National Kaohsiung Normal University of Taiwan. The experimental
students were taught by using historical teaching materials which indicated how
scientists developed their understandings of phenomena, namely scientists’ original
debates, discussions, and experiments. Group discussions, debates, teacher
demonstrations, project-assignments, and hands-on experiments, were used to
replicate historical scientists’ work. The control group students did not take courses
related to the history of science. Before and after the teaching, all student conceptions
of the nature of science were assessed quantitatively with a modified version of
VOSTS, a multiple-choice questionnaire (Aikenhead and Ryan, 1992). After they had
completed the questionnaire, five students of the experimental group were selected
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