Defining versus describing the nature of science: A pragmatic analysis forclassroom teachers and science educators

There appears to be an almost universal commitment among science educators to promote the goal of student understanding of the nature of science. Rece nt disagreements among philosophers of science and between philosophers and other groups such as scientists and science educators about the nature of science, however, leave classroom teachers in a quandry: If experts disagre e about the nature of science, how should we decide what to teach students? In this article, the authors first reconsider what level of understanding of the nature of science students should experience so that they can become both intelligent consumers of scientific information and effective local a nd global citizens. Second, based on an analysis of the literature, it appe ars that there is a general agreement among science education stakeholders regarding a set of descriptors that can be used to judge which questions or fields of study are more scientific or less scientific than others. Theref ore, we propose that most precollege teachers should attempt to teach stude nts how to use these descriptors to judge the relative merits of knowledge claims instead of teaching a set of rules that attempt to demarcate science completely from nonscience. Finally, we suggest two classroom activities b ased on this proposal and draw some implications for teacher preparation an d future research. (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.