Abstract

This study examines conceptual change in some aspects of nature of science (NOS) in undergraduate students after learning through the explicit approach. NOS is an essential component in the Thai curriculum and is required knowledge for science teachers. Forty-one undergraduate students who study in the teacher education program participated in this classroom action research. Students’ understanding of various aspects of NOS was assessed, including the empirical and tentative nature of scientific knowledge, the nature of science experiment, and the nature of scientific law and theory. To examine the pre-instruction view of NOS, some items of Views of Nature of Science Questionnaire-Form C (VNOS-C), developed by Fouad Abd-El-Khalick were administered to the students. Using cross-items analysis, the results indicated that most of them held naïve ideas of NOS in all aspects. For example, forty-one percent of the students distinguished science from other subjects by simply inferring that science is facts that can be proved or just a reasonable subject. Seventy-eight percent of the students viewed science experiment as the process of proving facts or learning activities in science class and, interestingly, all of them held misconceptions related to the nature of scientific law and theory. For example, they believed that law is different from theory because law is certain while theory is not. The students' conceptions of NOS dramatically changed after learning with the explicit approach, which was reported to be an effective strategy to teach NOS. The instruction included explicit discussion of science history, group study of scientific articles, and use of models and analogies as the tools for reflective discussion on scientific theory and law. To describe how the students had changed their conceptions of NOS, the percentage of students' responses are reported and discussed. In order to examine the effectiveness of the learning activities in the cognitive aspects, bivariate analysis was conducted to compare the students’ understanding with the expected criteria. The pre-service teachers’ satisfaction with all learning activities was also at a high level. The results of this study support the idea of using the explicit approach in teaching NOS.