Teaching aspects of the interrelationship between science and technology: a research report on the design, enactment and evaluation of a teaching proposal

ABSTRACT

Background: Helping upper elementary and lower secondary school students develop an awareness of various aspects of the nature of science (NOS) and nature of technology (NOT) is a widely recognized goal of science teaching. In this study, we focus on the connections between science and technology (S&T).

Purpose: We report on the design, development, enactment and evaluation of a teaching-learning sequence (TLS) that combines hands-on activities in geometrical optics with explicit epistemological discourse for reflection purposes. The design of the TLS draws on perspectives from the inquiry-oriented and design-based teaching and learning frameworks.

Sample: The enactment of the TLS involved a class of 17 sixth-grade students, aged 10–11 years old, of a public elementary school in Cyprus.

Design and methods: We present findings from written responses to both closed and open-ended tasks as well as follow-up semi-structured interviews that probed students’ understanding of the difference between the main goals of S&T.

Results: The results illustrate elementary students’ readiness to engage with epistemic issues and demonstrate the potential of prompting young learners’ ability to develop informed awareness of the NOS and NOT. The results also provided feedback for the revision of the TLS so as to further enhance its effectiveness in achieving the stated learning objectives.

Conclusion: We discuss the implications of our findings for the teaching of the NOS and NOT and for the design and validation of TLSs. It is possible for students of this age group to develop an awareness of issues related to the NOS and NOT. TLSs can be improved through design-based research approaches to serve as productive tools to this end.

KEYWORDS:

• Teaching and learning sequence
• nature of science
• explicit epistemological discourse
• science and technology

Acknowledgments

Work presented in this paper has been partially supported by the European Union through the European Communities Research Directorate General in the project Materials Science – University-school partnerships for the design and implementation of research-based ICT-enhanced modules on Material Properties, Science and Society Programme, FP6, SAS6-CT - 2006-042942). We would like to acknowledge substantial contributions from Dr Nicos Papadouris in the design and refinement of the teaching-learning sequence.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Also reported as control of variables strategy (D. Klahr, D. Kuhn), design and conduct of scientific investigations (D. Kuhn, N. Lederman), experimental design (N. Lederman).

2. The appropriateness of this parametric test was warranted through ensuring equal interval scaling in the FT and ED scores, on scales developed with the Rasch model (Boone and Scantlebury 2006) as part of a previous study (Constantinou, Hadjilouca,and Papadouris 2010) that evaluated students’ awareness of the same issue (N = 393).