Science capabilities for a functional understanding of the nature of science
Rosemary Hipkins and Ally Bull
http://dx.doi.org/10.18296/cm.0007
Abstract
This article begins by making the case that the New Zealand curriculum component known as the Nature of Science (NOS) has generally not, thus far, achieved its stated intent of helping students think differently about science and its relevance to their lives. We argue that NOS components in curricula have tended to become positioned as additional content to be learned, at least partly as a consequence of well-meaning curriculum support initiatives that aim to build teachers’ own NOS knowledge. The result is that NOS is added to an already overburdened curriculum, potentially making science even more abstract and inaccessible for some students than it already is. Having outlined the nature of the problem, we then describe a recent initiative that endeavoured to address the NOS challenge in a different way. We began by asking how a NOS focus might contribute to changes in teaching and learning that more deliberately focus on supporting students to build their science capabilities so that they can become the informed citizens that The New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) identifies as the overarching goal for science learning. This curriculum initiative introduces science capabilities as a set of ideas for teachers to think with. The capabilities were derived from the intersection of the generic key competencies in NZC, the NOS strand from the science learning area, and the NZC purpose statement for learning science, which emphasises citizenship. However, as we outline in the final section of the article, it is proving very hard to expand views of learning as content acquisition to include the participatory sensibility that the addition of capabilities implies. The idea of capabilities makes intuitive sense to teachers but using them as classroom prompts to think more deeply about NOS with their students is still a work in progress.
Introduction: Scoping the Nature of Science challenge
Research in many different settings (secondary and primary schools, different nations) has documented teachers’ lack of Nature of Science (NOS) knowledge as a persistent challenge for gaining traction with changes in science education. This dilemma is well summarised by Lederman & Lederman (2014). In this first section of the article we draw on a wide-ranging body of international research to argue that the development of specific “NOS propositions”, while intended to support teachers to develop their own NOS knowledge, may have inadvertently reinforced the treatment of NOS as additional curriculum “content”. By contrast, a NOS curriculum component is intended to help make science more relevant, inclusive, and pertinent to students’ lives beyond school. A NOS-infused curriculum should support students to achieve a functional level of science literacy that is “useful in daily life” (Feinstein, 2011, p. 169). Seeing such relevance for science learning is an important first step towards building an awareness of the many ways in which science is used (and misused) in society.
In the later part of the 20th century several large-scale projects helped to build consensus about the actual knowledge that should be subsumed under the NOS umbrella (Rutherford & Ahlgren, 1990; Osborne, Collins, Ratcliffe, & Duschl, 2001). These projects produced sets of so-called “NOS propositions”, each of which is a brief philosophical statement about some aspect of science as a knowledge-building system. Variations on the early sets of propositions have been in wide circulation since they were developed. In New Zealand an amalgam of the US/UK propositions underpinned the development, around the turn of the century, of a Science IS website. This has more recently been subsumed into Ministry of Education’s official curriculum support portal Science Online.1 Some of the Science IS ideas are clearly visible in the wording of the achievement objectives in the NOS strand of the science learning area in The New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007) (NZC).
NOS propositions were intended to address the documented deficit in teacher knowledge. However, there is international evidence that in practice they have failed to gain much traction in changing teaching and learning. Internationally, teachers mostly continue to teach science in the content-focused way that has prevailed for so long, even when data has been gathered that shows improvements in their personal knowledge of NOS following relevant professional learning (Lederman, 2007; Lederman & Lederman, 2014). We have no evidence to suggest that New Zealand’s teachers are an exception to this prevailing situation. Indeed there is some evidence that, as for teachers elsewhere, NOS has not impacted on pedagogy in many classrooms. For example, just 43 percent of secondary teachers (n = 179) and 45 percent of primary teachers (n = 122) who responded to a recent online survey agreed that the NOS strand of NZC had changed the way they teach science (Hipkins & Hodgen, 2012). The teachers whom this survey reached were all well connected into wider science-education networks. The proportions would likely be higher if we had reached a wider range of respondents.
Why might this commonly enacted NOS-as-propositions approach to building science teachers’ professional knowledge have made so little impact? One set of issues concerns the brevity of the NOS propositions themselves. When taken out of context, they are stripped-back statements devoid of important qualifications and clarifications. Critics have argued that this renders them vulnerable to misinterpretation. Personal support for a proposition can reside at either a naive or a sophisticated level of philosophical thinking and it is not possible, without deeper conversation, to tell the difference between the two (Elby & Hammer, 2001). Advocates for the use of the propositions argue that they should not be taken out of context and should always be woven together to build webs of understanding (Schwartz, Lederman, & Abd-el-Khalick, 2012). But doing this requires teachers to hold that deeper level of understanding of the propositions themselves, so this argument can only take us so far. In any case, when content acquisition is the learning purpose that teachers most value, they are unlikely to want to take time to delve into the reasoning behind students’ NOS responses. In worst-case scenarios, they might actively teach misconceptions about NOS to students.
One commonly reported teacher misconception is that NOS knowledge is developed as part of any scientific inquiry. When this conflation is made, teachers appear to assume that students learn about science simply by doing practical science-like activities. In contrast, the research literature explicitly treats NOS, science processes, and science content as three distinct but complementary knowledge areas and says that all three need to be explicitly developed. Lederman and his colleagues use the term NOSI—Nature of Science Investigations—to underscore the point (Lederman, 2007). NOS insights can potentially emerge from investigations, given appropriately focused reflective conversations (Hodson, 2014). But NOS insights do need to be taught.
Even if teachers do succeed in developing more sophisticated personal understandings of the NOS propositions, and if they see them as sufficiently important to include in the enacted curriculum (both of these are problematic “ifs”), it is not clear how, precisely, the NOS ideas per se will help address the action-oriented concerns that prompted their inclusion in the curriculum in the first place. A functional understanding of NOS requires students to be able to use this knowledge to address meaningful learning challenges (Feinstein, 2011; Allchin, 2011). But what sorts of things should they be able to do with their growing NOS insights at different ages and stages of schooling? What does a NOS-informed curriculum look like: for new entrants; for 10 year olds; for those close to leaving school? Teachers need concrete examples that illustrate the difference that NOS could make to the science teaching and learning they plan.
Without a thorough rethinking of the purposes for learning science, and in the absence of concrete exemplars, the best that might be hoped for is that NOS ideas are added to curriculum alongside content. Unintentionally, this sort of treatment could render the curriculum even more difficult and abstract for students than it already is (Hipkins, 2006). If this happens, then inclusion of NOS as a component of a more inclusive and relevant science curriculum could exacerbate rather than resolve challenges of engaging students in seeing a meaningful place for themselves within the science learning they experience.
Yet another challenge is that traditional content-focused curricula appear to take transfer for granted when they also claim to prepare students for participation in society. The assumption appears to be that, given sufficient front-loading of facts and science ideas, educated citizens will be ready, willing, and able to access and use the school science knowledge when relevant. Yet research evidence suggests transfer is not particularly common unless it is explicitly modelled and supported (Bransford & Schwartz, 1999). In any case the transfer of science knowledge to out-of-school contexts requires a sort of “science literacy in action” (Aikenhead, Orpwood, & Fensham, 2011, p. 33) that is bound up in the demands of the context and so cannot ever be just about the direct transfer of declarative school knowledge:
SL-in-action requires that students come to understand their ST [science–technology] knowledge as having a purpose beyond simply “knowing that”. Examples of such purposes include: getting and keeping ST-related employment, informing daily activities, analyzing socioscientific issues, and comprehending global concerns. (Aikenhead, Orpwood, & Fensham, 2011, p. 33)
In the absence of explicit thinking about what types of knowledge can transfer, under what conditions, NOS is unlikely to transcend curriculum positioning as additional knowledge to be learned.
Developing a functional understanding of NOS
The metaphor of “whole” learning has been proposed as one response to the challenges outlined above (Allchin, 2011). Allchin argues that learning in science should be structured so that specific NOS insights emerge from reflection on real issues set in real contexts. These contexts need to be carefully chosen and shaped to give students scaffolded practice at using their growing knowledge of NOS to address problems or challenges in which some science-related question plays a central role. The end result, he argues, will be to build a functional understanding of NOS—i.e. one that can be used to make judgments and decisions about real issues.
Critics of Allchin’s suggestion argue that it is unrealistic to expect young students to be able to deal with the complexities of “whole” issues—or even “whole” NOS insights (Schwartz et al., 2012). This is an important objection, grounded in the realities of actual classroom teaching and what can reasonably be expected at different ages. However the metaphor of “junior versions of whole games” provides one useful way of thinking about this dilemma (Perkins, 2009). Just as children learn to play various sports via simplified versions with fewer rules and more achievable scoring targets, so they might begin to stretch their learning via “junior versions” of whole learning episodes. But there is still the critical question of what this type of learning might look like at different ages and stages of schooling. The challenge for primary-school teachers is that many of them are not confident to teach science at all. The challenge for secondary-school teachers is likely to be that they will need reassurance that any proposed model of whole learning will not compromise the teaching of the science concepts they see as centrally important to science and hence to their teaching of science.
In one attempt to think our way through these challenges, we drew on a proposal that originated from an analysis of “science studies” literature (Ford & Forman, 2006). This article included a concrete suggestion for developing NOS insights during scientific inquiries. Ford and Forman suggested that teachers add reflective dimensions to rich classroom-based inquiries in order to build students’ awareness of two main roles that scientists undertake in their work. Scientists are simultaneously constructors of new knowledge claims and critiquers of the claims made by other scientists. Drawing on an actual inquiry context, we developed a model to show how this two-role focus might play out in a middle-school classroom (Hipkins, 2012). This was not especially easy to do and there still remained the challenge of how and why teachers might be persuaded to take up such an approach. With this in mind, we turn now to the challenge of interpreting and implementing NZC as something more than a loose collection of different parts.
Weaving the two halves of NZC together to focus on capability-building
On its own, the structure of NZC does not give clear signals about how functional NOS understandings might be developed. As a framework curriculum, it can be interpreted in multiple ways. There is nothing definitive to say that the Science learning area framework, and specifically the role played by the NOS strand, ought to be interpreted in empowering and forward-looking ways. However, if the more visionary front half of NZC is brought into play, the message that learning should be future-focused and build students’ capabilities for informed citizenship is much stronger.
As befits a framework curriculum, the front part of NZC provides guidance for strategic curriculum thinking about the contribution made by different subjects to students’ overall learning. This guidance takes the form of a pithy “essence statement” that sets out the unique contribution that each learning area makes to the enacted curriculum. The science essence statement says that:
In science, students explore how both the natural physical world and science itself work so that they can participate as critical, informed, and responsible citizens in a society in which science plays a significant role. (Ministry of Education, 2007, p.17)
The developers of the achievement objectives for the science learning area recognised the potential to align the key competencies with the NOS strand so that this stated intent might be realised in practice (Barker, Hipkins, & Bartholomew, 2004). NZC defines key competencies as “capabilities for living and lifelong learning” (p. 12). The development of the key competencies is “an end in itself (a goal) and the means by which other ends are achieved” (p. 12). Further, the key competencies “draw on knowledge, skills, attitudes and values in ways that lead to action” (p. 12). When these features of key competencies are juxtaposed with the science essence statement, which emphasises informed and responsible citizenship, the “other end” to which key competencies might make a contribution in the context of science learning becomes more evident. The curriculum question now becomes one of determining what all students might need to learn in science, during their years at school, that they can carry into their adult years as a reference point for decision-making and action, for example when addressing any one of the many socio-scientific issues that will inevitable impact on their lives (see for example Zeidler, 2014).
Framing the essential nature of key competencies as capabilities helps bring critical curriculum and pedagogical challenges to the forefront of debates about what students should be able to do, and to become, as a result of the learning opportunities they experience across the curriculum (Hipkins, 2005). Some researchers have arrived at the idea of capabilities from a perspective oriented to questions of social justice (Reid, 2006). Here the very idea of capabilities cues the moral imperative to support the freedom of every person to become the person they are capable of being (Walker, 2008). This wider capabilities conversation originated in the intersection of various fields of social inquiry (economics, education, health, and public policy-making) with human thriving in the world seen to implicate a complex mix of all these fields of influence (Nussbaum & Sen, 1993).
In the field of education, the departure point for this different set of assumptions about capabilities envisages learning as a preparation for taking a well-informed and capable participatory role in society (Rychen & Salganik, 2003) and having action competence, which assumes being willing and having the knowledge and ability to act (Sterling, 2001). In such an interpretation, capabilities are demonstrated in context, and the societal conditions within which action might take place are seen as integral to learning rather than its backdrop.
One recent research project commissioned by the Ministry of Education explored the question of how it might be possible to evaluate the “international capabilities” of New Zealand students at the point of school leaving (Bolstad, Hipkins & Stevens, 2014). As one part of this research the team distilled a decade of research related to the implementation of NZC to arrive at the following observations about the implications of positioning key competencies as capabilities:
Capabilities bring an action focus to learning: To demonstrate capability it is necessary to do something. This implies that strengthening and stretching of capabilities needs to be supported and facilitated by the provision of appropriate opportunities to practice using NOS ideas to make personally meaningful learning connections and decisions (that is, to develop a functional NOS understanding).
How teachers frame purposes for learning matters: The way in which teachers think about purposes for learning will impact on students’ opportunities for capability development. A particular challenge here is that views about purposes for learning are often held tacitly rather than explicitly articulated. As already outlined, NZC is clear about purposes for learning science, but not about how to combine NOS and traditional content with capability development in mind.
Capabilities have reflective dimensions: reflective dimensions are integral to being capable. Many people can do things in familiar contexts that they cannot successfully transfer to less-familiar conditions—that is, they act intuitively on the basis of established routines and experiences. Capable adults, on the other hand, can think about the knowledge and skills required to achieve new challenges, and match these to their own current abilities. In this way, they learn and stretch their capabilities, which is exactly what the curriculum intends for school learners.
The disposition to use capabilities must be fostered: Capabilities are defined as requiring the integration of knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values. The inclusion of attitudes and values underscores the importance of being disposed to act on new learning. But we cannot make learners critically engage with science. If we want today’s students to do so as tomorrow’s citizens we have to show them how, give them lots of practice, and support them to see these as things they can do, and want to do, for themselves. A few unrelated experiences in school science experiments will not be enough because demonstrations of capability are multifaceted and context-specific (that is, they are “whole” in the sense intended by Allchin (2011) and Perkins (2009)) and you have to want to deploy them.
With all these characteristics in mind, we understood that capability-building would require many interrelated experiences that make a powerful impression on students, and that build over time. Capability development cannot be a one-off learning experience.
Introducing the capabilities resources
We turn now to the main output of another project commissioned by the Ministry of Education, this time a combination of research and curriculum development. The capabilities resources we introduce next were developed to show some explicit ways to “join the dots” between all of the following:
•the content strands of the science learning area
•the “overarching” NOS strand
•the essence statement that foregrounds the citizenship purpose for learning science
•the key competencies (defined as capabilities for living and lifelong learning)
•some existing resources designed to support learning in science.
We thought about what we might realistically expect students of different ages to do to build NOS insights as an integrated but explicit part of their science-learning experiences. Our aim was to build towards a functional grasp of NOS propositions included in the consensus sets that already exist. We were aware that such knowledge would need reflective participation, and that its development would need to be understood by teachers as an important purpose in its own right. We foresaw different challenges for primary and secondary teachers, but the project we had undertaken needed to support both sectors.
We were aware that many primary teachers lack confidence to teach much science at all (Education Review Office, 2012) and that layering NOS on top of existing uncertainties might seem an unrealistic ask without really concrete support. On the other hand, many secondary teachers take their cue about what matters from high-stakes assessments. The various assessment modules in New Zealand’s school exit qualifications in science mostly infuse NOS tacitly in assessment tasks, or ignore it altogether. Thus our aim of reframing secondary teachers’ views about purposes for learning science needed to be balanced with the “coverage” imperative most of them still experience as a professional pressure. In primary schools, high-stakes assessment pressures focus on literacy and numeracy “national standards” so we needed to find ways to accommodate science alongside the imperative to develop those.
With all these challenges in mind we came to the idea that a tightly focused, readily recalled set of “science capabilities” might serve as prompts for classroom NOS conversations and experiences—that is, they would be resources for teachers to “think with”, when planning, working with students, and when reflecting on the learning actually achieved. Recall that NZC says that all students should become “responsible citizens in a society in which science pays a significant role” (p. 17). Each capability encapsulates possibilities for a range of active, reflective learning experiences with the potential to build over time towards meeting this ambitious aim. The preliminary set of capabilities, as described for teachers, is as follows:
Gather & interpret data: Science knowledge is based on data derived from direct, or indirect, observations of the natural physical world and often includes measuring something. An inference is a conclusion you draw from observations—the meaning you make from observations. Understanding the difference between observation and inference is an important step towards being scientifically literate.
Use evidence: Science is a way of explaining the world. Science is empirical and measurable. This means that in science, explanations need to be supported by evidence that is based on, or derived from, observations of the natural world.
Critique evidence: To evaluate the trustworthiness of data, students need to know quite a lot about the qualities of scientific tests.
Interpret representations: Learners think about how data is presented and ask questions such as: What does this representation tell us? What is left out? How does this representation get the message across? Why is it presented in this particular way?
Engage with science: This capability requires students to use the other capabilities to engage with science in “real life” contexts.
The capabilities map readily onto the NOS substrands of NZC. The first three capabilities—“use evidence”, “critique evidence”, and “interpret representations”— map to “Understanding about science” if the focus is on scientists’ work, and to “Investigating in science” if the focus is on students’ own work. “Interpret representations” and “engage with science” both map directly onto the NOS substrands of “Communicating in science and “Participating and contributing”.
Each capability sounds really simple and their high-level ideas will already be familiar to teachers. This was important and deliberate. We wanted primary teachers who might previously have been reluctant to engage with science to see that there are things they can do quite readily. For example, differentiating between observation and inference is familiar to teachers from their reading programmes, and is also a feature of the statistical inquiry cycle used in maths. We hoped that secondary teachers would see that we were not asking for a radical departure from things they already enjoy teaching—or for them to abandon the teaching of concepts they see as centrally important to science literacy. (Note that a reduction in coverage for its own sake is implied.)
Research shows that teachers are likely to over-assimilate new ideas if these do not create cognitive dissonance that challenges their thinking (Pedder & Opfer, 2013; Timperley, Wilson, Barrar, & Fung, 2007). We needed to balance the reassurance of familiar links with new NOS-related challenges to existing curriculum thinking. It was important that the resources we created would model a different way to use existing resources, so that an aspect of the capability is explicitly highlighted and developed during teacher–student conversations. At least 10 resources sit behind each capability. Each resource models an idea for making a simple adaptation to an existing resource so that an aspect of NOS is explicitly developed during teaching and learning. The general idea is to provide rich experiences that will demonstrably contribute to building the capabilities over time, helping students to become more discerning when they engage with science as responsible citizens.
Early insights and next challenges
In this final section of the article we critique the capabilities initiative in the light of the challenges outlined in the earlier sections of the article, with some informal knowledge of how teachers have responded to date. It is too soon for any formal evaluation to have been undertaken so the “evidence” in this section is inevitably anecdotal. However we can already see challenges that point to the complexity of the changes NOS-related initiatives expect of teachers and those who support them.
One early impression is that teachers are most comfortable engaging with the capability “gather and interpret data”, albeit with a relatively narrow range of actions and insights in mind. Making careful observations is intuitively seen by primary teachers as “doing science” and is also readily accommodated in secondary school “practical work”. However one specific risk, as the proponents of Nature of Science Investigations (NOSI) have long warned, is that the simple act of participation in making observations is no guarantee that any NOS insights will be developed. A second type of risk is that observations need to be made within the frame of reference of a specific science concept. In the absence of an appropriate theoretical lens for the act of “observing”, the learning that happens is unlikely to be a science experience and could well misrepresent NOS.
Researchers and advisors who have had opportunities to observe investigative lessons in action have noticed that potential opportunities to develop capabilities other than or in addition to gathering and interpreting data appeared to pass teachers by in the moment. Genuinely “whole” investigations (as discussed in section 2) involve all the capabilities we have identified, and more, simultaneously. In any learning activity the teacher must choose what to foreground in the moment. The potential of the capabilities approach might only be realised once a wider range of capability-developing opportunities become apparent to teachers in all the messy whole complexity of moment-by-moment classroom action.
We now see the intentional surface familiarity of the capabilities as a useful but limited “hook”. Challenging professional learning has an important role to play in ensuring that the capabilities are appropriately understood and used. Teachers need to encounter them in circumstances that make their design intent and scope clear and that challenge their thinking about purposes for learning science and how those purposes can drive the learning action more explicitly. Access to rich professional learning conversations could also help ameliorate the risk of the broader idea of capability being over-assimilated into existing curriculum thinking when intuitive links are made. Experience to date suggests that, unless a rethinking of purposes for learning science is brought into the mix, the informed citizenship described as the NZC overarching aim for science learning is still likely to be lost sight of.
Worryingly, we have seen indications that some people are treating “the five capabilities” as if they are replacement content for the sets of skills in earlier versions of the curriculum, or as specific content to add to the curriculum and hence to learn about. Positioned this way they perpetuate the “NOS as content” challenge outlined in the first section of the article. Their design as ideas to think with does not appear to have registered when they are treated this way. However, when this dilemma is pointed out, teachers and advisers generally respond positively. We have begun to emphasise their role as conversation shapers, and to highlight the importance of the types of questions the teacher poses for discussion.
We have already noted that each capability is multifaceted. We can now see that some important facets are not sufficiently delineated within such a small set, and probably need separate treatment. For example, we wonder if “noticing patterns and relationships” should have been developed separately from “gathering and interpreting data”, given its critical role in learning and transfer more generally.
We are aware of some inadvertent limitations in the way the capability “engage with science” is presented and understood. We intended this capability to draw the other four together for use in “whole” contexts, as outlined above. However within the enabling constraints of our project as funded, we developed a suite of separate resources to support this capability, in the same manner as we had done for the other four. The holistic intent might well be lost within this reductionist approach. Indeed the reduction of complex and multifaceted capabilities to small “teachable” pieces is a risk for the project as whole unless unifying contexts and real issues are used to bring the pieces together.
It will be clear that the capabilities initiative is still a work in progress. Notwithstanding the concerns we have outlined, we know we need to start somewhere to do something different. We are also acutely aware that unless teachers can see how to begin to make changes they will not even get started. Visions of a transformative curriculum will not sway them if these seem unrealistic to attain. We look forward to seeing the results of other’s research that uses and critiques our work, thereby adding new insights to the complex challenge of using NOS to drive meaningful curriculum change.
Note
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The authors
Dr Rosemary Hipkins is a chief researcher at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research. She was a secondary science and biology teacher and also worked in teacher education before moving to NZCER. Rose has researched the uptake and implementation of NZC since its inception, with a particular focus on key competencies.
Email: rose.hipkins@nzcer.org.nz
Ally Bull is a part-time senior researcher at NZCER. She also works as a consultant, supporting schools to implement strong primary science programmes. Ally was a primary school teacher and she also worked in teacher education before joining NZCER. She is particularly interested in building strong school–community links to support children’s learning.
Email: ally.bull@nzcer.org.nz
1 http://scienceonline.tki.org.nz/