ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the steady rise in importance of nature of science as a curriculum component, in spite of many controversies that surround the subject. The controversies have arisen for many reasons, for example there is poor correlation between the culture of practising scientists and that of school science, especially with regard to different emphases on the procedural understanding of science (Gott, Duggan and Johnson 1999). The central theme of this chapter is that teaching the nature of science (NoS) is an important bridge between these two cultures. Somewhat paradoxically, the NoS bridge itself is full of flaws, which add to the controversy, and these too are explored in the first part of the chapter.
