Exploring science teachers' views about the nature of science and how these views influence their classroom practices

Abstract

This study explored the science teachers' views about the nature of science and how these views influenced their classroom. The study was conducted in three public quantile-three schools in Dimamo Circuit of Capricorn District-Limpopo Province. It was a case study with twenty participants filling the open-ended questionnaire with four teachers who were observed and interviewed. The teachers were from the FET band with teaching experience ranging between one year and thirty years. The essential research questions addressed in this study are, namely: What are science teachers’ views about the nature of science? How do the science teachers’ views about the nature of science influence their classroom practices? Data were collected all the way through open-ended questionnaires, classroom observations and semi-structured interviews. The data collected were analysed through groups of themes. The four teachers observed and interviewed were grouped as one case. It was found that most of the teachers held informed views about the nature of science from both data collected from the open-ended questionnaires and semi structured interviews. There was a group of teachers whose views about the nature of science being tentative reflected uninformed views and the majority of teachers revealing uninformed views about the difference between scientific law and scientific theory. The teachers believed that theories develop into laws. There was also a majority of teachers who believed that scientific investigation follows only one universal route. It was also found that the same teachers who reflected informed views were not able to back them in their classroom practices. The majority of those teachers reflected no informed views in their classroom as such it was impossible to tell how their views influenced their classroom practices. KEY WORDS Nature of science, Classroom practice, Scientific law, Tentative, Scientific theory