Abstract
While the importance of explicit and reflective NOS instruction is clear in the literature, questions remain about how to enact such instruction. That is, literature is sometimes unclear in defining how to enact explicit and reflective NOS instruction. While some authors recommend using questions (e.g., Clough 2007) to enact effective NOS instruction, we are not aware of NOS literature that meaningfully differentiates between types of questions and, to the extent of our knowledge, no research has been done to compare the effects of question types on student thinking about NOS. To investigate the impact of type of NOS question on student responses, we created four versions of a historical short story and randomly gave 6th grade students (N = 161) one of the versions. One version of the story had general reflection questions in which students are repeatedly asked, “What do you notice or want to remember?” A second version contained general NOS questions in which students were repeatedly asked, “What does this say about science and how scientists work?” The third version included specific NOS questions targeting particular NOS ideas. For example, “How do you think science and technology affect each other?” The final version included specific NOS questions with additional preamble to support student responses. For example, “Notice that science is helping develop new clock technology and that new technology is helping science. How do you think science and technology affect each other?” The participants tended to address more NOS ideas when asked specific NOS questions with or without preamble. A significant decrease in the number of NOS ideas addressed was observed for the general NOS questions and students rarely addressed NOS ideas when asked the general reflective questions. Although more specific questions encouraged participants to address more NOS concepts, the responses to more specific questions tended to be normative rather than descriptive. Implications for teaching and teacher education are discussed as well as one strategy that we have used to support teacher creation of specific NOS questions.
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Kruse, J., Kent-Schneider, I., Voss, S. et al. Investigating the Effect of NOS Question Type on Students’ NOS Responses. Res Sci Educ 52, 61–78 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-020-09923-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-020-09923-z