Learning about the Nature of Scientific Knowledge: The Imitating-Science Project

Abstract

This paper reports a small-scale curriculum project aimed at teaching about the nature of science at lower secondary school. The main idea of this project is to stimulate students’ learning of science as a process by involving the students in reflections based on personal experience of an open-ended investigation. The paper describes how it is possible to include publication and argumentation of methods and results in a school experiment, as well as findings related to changes in students’ epistemological thinking. The students wrote about how researchers conduct research prior to and after the project. Analysis of these texts showed that more students included the idea of testing hypotheses in the post-study texts than in the pre-study texts. Students also expressed more awareness of what researchers might do to enhance the quality of their research. We found that students tended to use words like “facts” and “proofs” in the prestudy texts. In the post-study texts, however, more students emphasised that research findings do not represent final answers but the researcher’s argument-based conclusions.