Reconceptualised family resemblance approach to nature of science in pre-service science teacher education

ABSTRACT

A recent framework on nature of science (NOS) is the Family Resemblance Approach (FRA). FRA presents NOS as a cognitive-epistemic and social-institutional system with a set of categories: aims and values, scientific methods, scientific practices, scientific knowledge and social-institutional aspects of science. Although FRA has been problematised philosophically and its implications for science education have been considered by science educators, its empirical adaptations in science education are limited. In order to illustrate the educational adaptations of FRA, we refer to Reconceptualised Family Resemblance Approach to Nature of Science or RFN. We present a study based on a funded pre-service science teacher education project whose aim was to design, implement and evaluate the impact of RFN strategies. Fifteen pre-service teachers participated in a 14-week teacher education intervention that infused RFN. A 70-item questionnaire was designed to investigate the outcomes of the teacher education intervention. Individual interviews with pre-service teachers were also conducted. Quantitative and qualitative data analysis suggest that the teacher education intervention had an overall significant impact on pre-service teachers’ views of NOS. The paper contributes to the understanding of how NOS can be incorporated in science teacher education using a new orientation to NOS based on FRA.

KEYWORDS:

• Nature of science
• pre-service teacher education
• family resemblance approach

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to acknowledge and thank (a) the financial contribution of Bogazici University Research Fund (Project Number 10621); (b) the pre-service teachers for their participation and for providing data used in the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Ebru Kaya http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8439-2395

Sibel Erduran http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5226-0136

Selin Akgun http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6672-498X

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Bogazici University Research Fund [grant number 10621].