Investigating Student Nature of Science Views as Reflections of Authentic Science

The study seeks to explore the extent to which students think pedagogical activities exemplifying various degrees of contextualization accurately reflect the work of scientists. Arguing for scaffolding across multiple degrees of contextualization, Clough (2006) reasoned that different contextualization plays different, but complimentary, roles in promoting conceptual change, and he suggested that decontextualized and moderately contextualized NOS activities may be dismissed by students as not representing authentic science. For this study, sixth-grade students (N = 137) engaged in three activities reflecting various levels of contextualization and responded to Likert and open-ended prompts asking them their perceptions about the relationship between the activity and real science. Students also ranked the activities from most to least like real science. Our findings demonstrate that participants most often described decontextualized and moderately contextualized activities as most representative of real science because participants perceived themselves to be acting like scientists. This study provides empirical support for Höttecke (2008) who, building on Clough (2006), proposed that both authentic contextualization and students’ actions in the classroom play roles in students’ perception of whether NOS teaching scenarios accurately represent authentic science. Given participants’ propensity to view highly contextualized NOS activities as less reflective of real science, this study illustrates the important role of the teacher in guiding student noticing during NOS activities. Challenging students’ narrow, action-oriented views of scientists appears to demand that teachers draw students’ attention to ways in which activities of all degrees of contextualization accurately and inaccurately represent NOS.