Children's Nature of Science Views and Personal Epistemologies

This book explores the impact of an intervention program designed to enhance upper elementary and middle school students’ nature of science (NOS) views : empirical NOS, tentative NOS, imagination and creativity, social and cultural embeddeness and subjectivity, and the distinction between observation and inference. It also explores young kids' personal epistemological beliefs, along with four- dimension epistemic belief scales: source of knowledge, certainty of knowledge, developments of knowledge, and justification of knowledge,through a combination of explicit-reflective decontextualized (content- free) NOS lessons and contextualized ( within content) inquiry-based science activities.The analyses of NOS survey, along with the transcripts of individual interviews, and personal epistemology survey revealed that after participating in the intervention young students made substantial gains in their views of some target NOS aspects: specifically observation versus inference and tentative NOS and that even young students can make significant progress in developing a more sophisticated epistemological beliefs through explicit-reflective instructional approach.