ABSTRACT
This study introduces an instructional program designed to promote scientific literacy. To promote scientific literacy, one focus of science education is scientific discovery learning. However, its effectiveness is dubious, because students face some difficulties in dealing with the discovery processes, especially coordinating hypotheses with evidence (e.g., Kuhn, 2002). Students do not attempt to associate their hypotheses with the evidence. And even if they do, they are so strongly biased that they retain their current hypotheses and ignore or distort the evidence. Taking this into account, the following two supports are necessary. The first is to introduce students to an association scheme, which promotes the students’ intention to associate their hypotheses with the evidence. The second is to place the students in a collaborative discovery situation. In a collaborative discovery situation, the meta-cognitive reviewing of each other’s discovery process could reduce irrational data processing when any evidence contradicts a student’s current hypotheses. Based on the above, the purpose of this study is to propose a program “collaborative discovery learning with an association scheme” to promote scientific literacy.
