English secondary students’ thinking about the status of scientific theories: consistent, comprehensive, coherent and extensively evidenced explanations of aspects of the natural world – or just ‘an idea someone has’

Abstract

Teaching about the nature of science (NOS) is seen as a priority for science education in many national contexts. The present paper focuses on one central issue in learning about NOS: understanding the nature and status of scientific theories. A key challenge in teaching about NOS is to persuade students that scientific knowledge is generally robust and reliable, yet also in principle always open to challenge and modification. Theories play a central role, as they are a form of conjectural knowledge that over time may be abandoned, replaced, modified, yet sometimes become well established as current best scientific understanding. The present paper reports on findings from interviews with 13–14 year olds in England where target knowledge presents theories as ‘consistent, comprehensive, coherent and extensively evidenced explanations of aspects of the natural world’. Student thinking reflected a two-tier typology of scientific knowledge in which largely unsupported imaginative ideas (‘theories’) became transformed into fairly definitive knowledge (such as laws) through relatively straightforward testing. These results are considered in relation to research into intellectual development which indicates that effective teaching in this area requires careful scaffolding of student learning, but has potential to contribute to supporting intellectual development across the curriculum.

Keywords:

• nature of science (NOS)
• scientific theory
• learners' epistemologies
• models of intellectual development
• scaffolding of learning
• sociocultural reasoning

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the staff and pupils in the four schools who contributed to this study. The study reported in this paper derives from the Learning about Science and Religion (LASAR) Project, under the auspices of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, based at St. Edmund's College, Cambridge.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The project is supported by John Templeton Foundation [grant number 15389].

Notes on contributors

Keith S. Taber

Dr Keith S Taber is a former school and college science teacher who is Reader in Science Education in the Faculty of Education at Cambridge, and chair of the Science, Technology and Mathematics Education Group.

Berry Billingsley

Dr Berry Billingsley is associate professor at the Institute of Education at the University of Reading, from where she directed the Learning about Science and Religion project.

Fran Riga

Dr Fran Riga works as a teaching and research associate in the Faculty of Education at Cambridge.

Helen Newdick

Helen Newdick was a researcher on the Learning about Science and Religion project based at the Institute of Education at the University of Reading.