The document discusses the nature of science (NOS), which refers to the characteristics of scientific knowledge. It is an important part of scientific literacy that allows students to understand science concepts and make informed decisions. NOS is informed by both scientific practices and decades of research on gathering and testing information about the natural world through various research methods. All those involved in science teaching should have an accurate understanding of NOS and teach it explicitly along with other science concepts. The document clarifies that NOS refers specifically to the characteristics of scientific knowledge, rather than how knowledge is developed, and aims to improve upon previous understandings of this topic.
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Nature of Science
The document discusses the nature of science (NOS), which refers to the characteristics of scientific knowledge. It is an important part of scientific literacy that allows students to understand science concepts and make informed decisions. NOS is informed by both scientific practices and decades of research on gathering and testing information about the natural world through various research methods. All those involved in science teaching should have an accurate understanding of NOS and teach it explicitly along with other science concepts. The document clarifies that NOS refers specifically to the characteristics of scientific knowledge, rather than how knowledge is developed, and aims to improve upon previous understandings of this topic.
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NATURE OF SCIENCE
Nature of science (NOS) is a critical
component of scientific literacy that enhances students’ understandings of science concepts and enables them to make informed decisions about scientifically-based personal and societal issues. NOS is derived not only from the eight science practices delineated in the Framework for K–12 Science Education (2012), but also from decades of research supporting the various forms of systematic gathering of information through direct and indirect observations of the natural world and the testing of this information by the various research methods used in science, such as descriptive, correlational, and experimental designs. All science educators and those involved with science teaching and learning should have a shared accurate view of nature of scientific knowledge, and recognize that NOS should be taught explicitly alongside science and engineering practices, disciplinary core ideas, and crosscutting concepts. It is important to know that this new iteration of NOS improves upon the previous NSTA position statement on this topic (NSTA 2000) that used the label “nature of science,” which included a combination of characteristics of scientific knowledge (NOS) and scientific inquiry. It demonstrated the common conflation of how scientific knowledge is developed and its characteristics. Since the recent NSTA position statement on science practices, previously referred to as
“inquiry” (NSTA 2018), clearly delineates how
knowledge is developed in science, a more appropriate label for the focus of this position statement would be “nature of scientific knowledge” (NOSK). This would clarify the difference between how knowledge is developed from the characteristics of the resulting knowledge. Clearly the two are closely related, but they are different (Lederman & Lederman 2014). However, introducing a new label (i.e., NOSK), given that the NGSS refers to the characteristics of scientific knowledge as NOS, would create more confusion. It will be clear that the discussion of NOS here is about the characteristics of scientific knowledge. Additionally, the word “the” is removed preceding NOS to avoid implying that a single set of knowledge characteristics exists.