Secondary school students’ epistemic insight into the relationships between science and religion – a preliminary enquiry

A number of previous studies have shown that there is a widespread view among young people that science and religion are opposed. In this paper, we suggest that it requires a significant level of what can be termed ‘epistemic insight’ to access the idea that some people see science and religion as compatible while others do not. To explore this further, we draw on previous work to devise a methodology to discover students’ thinking about apparent contradictions between scientific and religious explanations of the origins of the universe. In our discussion of the findings, we highlight that students’ epistemic insight in this context does seem in many cases to be limited and we outline some of the issues emerging from the study that seem to boost or limit students’ progress in this area

Abandoning patchwork approaches to nature of science in science education

The purpose of this commentary on Hodson and Wong’s paper is to clarify the merits of the Expanded Family Resemblance Approach to science education, briefly alluded to in their paper, and to discuss the implications of this approach relative to the question of demarcation they raise in their paper. In clarifying the merits of the expanded FRA, we describe its distinct features and how it relates to other approaches presented in their paper. We discuss some limitations pertaining to their discussion of the demarcation problem in science education, and conclude by pointing out the promising role an FRA approach might play in providing means for distinguishing more from less scientific fields of inquiry

Student, teacher, and scientist views of the scientific enterprise: an epistemic network re-analysis

There is substantial research in science education about students’, teachers’, and scientists’ views of nature of science (NOS). Many studies have used NOS frameworks that focus on particular ideas such as tentativeness of scientific knowledge and cultural embeddedness of science. In this paper, we investigate NOS from the perspective of the Family Resemblance Approach (FRA) which considers clusters of ideas about science in terms of categories that offer a comprehensive analytical lens to studying NOS views. The empirical study re-analyzes NOS views obtained from 7 and 8th grade students, science teachers, and scientists using the FRA lens. Statements from all three groups were obtained using a free-write questionnaire on nature of knowledge and nature of knowing. The statements were reclassified using the FRA framework. Epistemic network analysis (ENA) was applied to the statements produced by each group of participants, and the resulting network models were interpreted and compared. The results show that student and teacher network models possessed no central idea, and more tangible ideas about science were frequently connected. Scientist network models showed more connections across their statements which indicate a higher degree of agreement and coherence among a variety of ideas compared to student and teacher network models. The paper discusses the findings as well as the methodological contributions, and concludes with implications for future research