Teaching about the social embeddedness, creativity and tentativeness of science through news articles on COVID-19

GEORGIOS AMPATZIDIS, MARIDA ERGAZAKI

Abstract

Scientific literacy has become central to science education and science education research several decades now. Although there may be different views about the meaning of the term, there is a broad consensus that scientific literacy includes an adequate understanding about the nature of science (NOS). NOS seems to be a hard topic for students and teachers. A popular approach to NOS teaching and learning is the ‘general aspects conceptualization of NOS’, which is based on conceptualizing NOS through partial, general aspects that may refer to the nature of scientific inquiry and the nature of scientific knowledge. These aspects are often introduced to students in a contextualized way, thus they may be integrated in lessons based on current scientific work. One way to do it is through news articles with scientific content. In our study, 16 educational sciences students were engaged in small-group and whole-class discussions in order to collaboratively respond to questions about issues raised in a news-based text highlighting the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientific research. Our results showed that the social embeddedness of science as well as the tentativeness of scientific knowledge and the creativity needed for its production, were successfully illustrated by the students.

Keywords

Nature of science, COVID-19, socio-cultural embeddedness, tentativeness, creativity

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References

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.26220/rev.4210

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