ABSTRACT
The centrality, ubiquity, and longevity of nature of science (NOS) in precollege science education cannot be overstated. The goal of helping precollege students internalize informed NOS understandings has been the subject of continuous and intensive research and development efforts around the globe since the early 1950s (see Lederman & Lederman, Chapter 30, this volume). This longstanding focus will endure into the future: NOS continues to be explicitly emphasized as a prominent curricular component and instructional goal in, for example, the most recent science education reform efforts in the United States embodied in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013). Syntheses of the research literature on NOS in science education provide for a robust narrative (e.g., Abd-El-Khalick & Lederman, 2000a; Lederman, 1992, 2007). This narrative speaks to gains in student NOS understandings in response to particular instructional interventions but asserts continued frustration with the prevalence of naïve NOS conceptions among a majority of precollege students. The lack of substantial progress is attributed to science teachers’ naïve NOS conceptions; systemic issues with science teacher education, including the nature of teachers’ scientific education in the academy; the predominance of a culture of school science instruction that is incommensurate with scientific practice, even among teachers who seem to have internalized informed NOS understandings; a host of situational and contextual factors that mediate the translation of teachers’ NOS understandings into their practice; and naïve representations of NOS in commercial science textbooks and instructional resources (Abd-El-Khalick, Waters, & Le, 2008; see Lederman & Lederman, Chapter 30, this volume). Research efforts continue to be dedicated to understanding the relative importance of the aforementioned factors and how best to mitigate their effects, and to delineating the nature and development among teachers of pedagogical content knowledge specific to teaching about NOS (Wahbeh & Abd-El-Khalick, 2013). Additionally, albeit drawing on incongruent empirical bases, debates continue about the differential impacts of instructional interventions (e.g., explicit versus implicit; integrated versus nonintegrated) on students’ and teachers’ NOS understandings; research also is being directed toward gauging the most effective contexts (e.g., argumentation, authentic research apprenticeships, historical case studies, inquiry-oriented experiences, socioscientific issues) and those best suited for addressing varying sets of NOS–related objectives; and vigorous discussions persist in relation to the sources that inform the construct of NOS, in addition to (re)emergent discussions about the very nature of the construct, this time from the perspective of domain-general versus domain-specific NOS understandings (see Abd-El-Khalick, 2012a, 2013). The aforementioned narrative also speaks to a multitude of assessments, which have been developed and used to gauge learners’ understandings: As many as two dozen NOS–specific instruments have come into being over the past 60 years (Lederman, 2007). The latter instruments and associated assessment approaches are the empirical content and object of investigation of the present chapter.
