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Research in Science Education ISSN 0157-244X Res Sci EducDOI 10.1007/s11165-012-9290-5

Prospective Elementary Teachers’Understanding of the Nature of Scienceand Perceptions of the Classroom LearningEnvironment

Catherine S. Martin-Dunlop

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Prospective Elementary Teachers’ Understandingof the Nature of Science and Perceptions of the ClassroomLearning Environment

Catherine S. Martin-Dunlop

# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Abstract This study investigated prospective elementary teachers’ understandings of the natureof science and explored associations with their guided-inquiry science learning environment.Over 500 female students completed the Nature of Scientific Knowledge Survey (NSKS),although only four scales were analyzed–Creative, Testable, Amoral, and Unified. The learningenvironment was assessed using previously-validated and reliable scales from What IsHappening In this Class? (WIHIC) and the Science Laboratory Environment Inventory (SLEI).Analyses indicated moderate multiple correlations that were statistically significant (p<0.01)between Creative (R00.22), Testable (R00.29), and Unified (R00.27), and a positive learningenvironment. Regression coefficients revealed that Open-Endedness was a significant indepen-dent predictor of students’ understanding of the role of creativity in science (β00.16), whileCooperation, Open-Endedness, and Material Environment were linked with understanding thetestable nature of science (β00.10–0.12). Interview questions probed possible relationshipsbetween an improved understanding of the nature of science and elements of a positive classroomenvironment. Responses suggested that an appropriate level of open-endedness during inves-tigations was very important as this helped students grapple with abstract nature of scienceconcepts and shift their conceptions closer to a more realistic view of scientific practice.

Keywords Classroom learning environment . Guided-inquiry science . Nature ofscience . Nature of Scientific Knowledge Survey (NSKS) . Open-endedness . Prospectiveelementary teachers . Science teacher education . Science Laboratory Environment Inventory(SLEI) . What Is Happening In this Class? (WIHIC)

Introduction

Only one published study in the past has linked the research fields of nature of science andlearning environments (Walberg and Anderson 1968). Most studies investigating the nature of

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C. S. Martin-Dunlop (*)Department of Advanced Studies, Leadership, & Policy, School of Education and Urban Studies,Morgan State University, 1700 E. Cold Spring Lane, Baltimore, MD 21251, USAe-mail: catherine.martin@morgan.edu

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science focus on identifying students’ or teachers’ misconceptions, and/or the effectiveness ofvarious instructional interventions to improve understanding. The study described in this paperis unique because it takes a holistic view of what happens in a classroom, and explores thejuxtaposition between two research fields. The study investigates the relationship between apositive classroom learning environment created during a science content course and prospec-tive elementary teachers’ understanding of some key aspects of the nature of science. Anunderlying purpose of the study was to determine what features of a positive classroom learningenvironment contribute most to knowledge acquisition of nature of science concepts. This studycan benefit nature of science researchers by providing an alternative perspective on efforts toimprove the teaching and learning of the nature of science.

Improving students’ understanding of the nature of science has been a primary goal ofscience education for decades. In Benchmarks for Science Literacy (1993), published by theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the entire first chapter isdevoted to the nature of science. In addition, another chapter titled “Habits of Mind”,discusses scientific thinking skills such as curiosity, problem-solving, and being skepticalyet open-minded—attributes that are closely linked with an understanding of the nature ofscience. Understanding ‘science as a human endeavor’ is a content standard (p. 108) forevery grade level from kindergarten to twelfth grade in the US National Science EducationStandards (NRC 1996). Undoubtedly, understanding the nature of science as an educationalgoal in these kind of guiding documents, has stimulated the growth of several researchprograms focusing exclusively on improving teachers’ and students’ understanding of thenature of science. Studies involving very young children (Akerson and Abd-El-Khalick2005; Quigley et al. 2011) to high school students (Bektas and Geban 2010; Lederman et al.2002; Schwartz et al. 2004; Yacoubian and BouJaaoude 2010), preservice teachers (Akersonet al. 2010; Bell et al. 2011; Gess-Newsome 2002; Irez 2006; McDonald 2010) to experi-enced science teachers (Donnelly and Argyle 2011; Posnanski 2010; Schwartz et al. 2010),and even scientists (Schwartz and Lederman 2008; Southerland et al. 2003), have beenconducted and are part of a large collection of exemplary work on the nature of science.

The field of learning environments research can benefit from this study as well. Thestrongest tradition in past studies has involved investigations of the predictability of stu-dents’ affective outcomes such as attitude, based on their perceptions of the classroomlearning environment. These investigations often explore associations between a positivelearning environment and attitude as well. Researchers have investigated associationsbetween a positive learning environment and other student outcomes such as motivation(Lui et al. 2011), concept development (Spinner and Fraser 2005), self-esteem (Fraser andChionh 2000), anxiety in mathematics (Taylor and Fraser 2004), and attitudes towardscomputer usage (Aldridge et al. 2002; Margianti et al. 2002; Raaflaub and Fraser 2003),to name just a few. International comparisons of learning environments have producedinteresting research (Fraser et al. 2010), including the recent translation of a questionnaireinto Arabic (MacLeod and Fraser 2010). Other studies have involved preservice teachereducation programs and inservice professional development for teachers with a focus onimproving learning environments (Harrington and Enochs 2009; Maor 2000; Pickett andFraser 2009; Van Petegem et al. 2005; Yarrow et al. 1997). However, investigating thestudent outcome of understanding the nature of science has not been previously explored. Asa result, important questions involving the preparation of teachers and nature of scienceconceptual understanding remain unanswered. The objectives of this study were to:

1. Develop valid and reliable measures of prospective elementary teachers’ understandingsof the nature of science,

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2. Investigate associations between understandings of the nature of science and classroomlearning environment, and,

3. Identify which variables of the classroom learning environment contribute most tounderstandings of the nature of science.

The Course

This study took place in 27 classes of a science content course (N0525) in a large, urbanuniversity in California. The course, called “A Process Approach to Science”, was specificallydesigned for prospective elementary teachers and other non-science majors in order to reinforceimportant concepts in the life, physical, and earth sciences. It is not a ‘methods’ course althoughreferences to teaching science to young children are often made. It is taught in a hybridlaboratory/seminar classroom in which a guided-open-ended approach to investigations is used.Prerequisites include three traditional laboratory science courses that place a heavy emphasis onacquiring a large body of knowledge, allow very little time for investigating the processes ofscience (Tilgner 1990), or for discussing how scientific work is actually conducted.Consequently, many students begin the course with negative attitudes towards science, lowself-efficacy in their abilities to do well in science, and little understanding of the nature ofscience. Goals of the course include having students like science and to have positive attitudestowards science, and to improve their understandings of the nature of science. Students’understandings of the nature of science were assessed using the Nature of ScientificKnowledge Survey—NSKS (Rubba and Anderson 1978). This efficient and forced-choiceinstrument was used due to the large sample size, and to allow the exploration of associationsbetween understanding the nature of science and students’ perceptions of the learning environ-ment. The learning environment was assessed using scales from What Is Happening In thisClass?—WIHIC (Fraser et al. 1996) and the Science Laboratory Environment Inventory—SLEI (Fraser et al. 1992). The six scales reflected the objectives of the study as well as theinstructional design and goals of the course.

Theoretical Background

Nature of Science

Ernst Mach (1838–1916), philosopher, physicist, and science educator, is believed to be thefirst person to promote an understanding of what we now describe as nature of science(Matthews 1994). Mach believed that:

Scientific theory is an intellectual construction for economizing thought, that scienceis fallible; it does not provide absolute truths, that science is a historically conditionedintellectual activity, and that scientific theory can only be understood if its historicaldevelopment is understood. (Matthews 1994, p. 98)

Mach was also one of the first educators to promote ‘thought experiments’ because hebelieved that, if students exercised their creativity and imagination during science, they werebuilding a connection between the humanities and the sciences (Matthews 1994).

Lederman (1992) traced the beginnings of the nature of science emphases to about thesame period that Matthews identified. In 1907, the Central Association of Science andMathematics Teachers in the US stated that the processes of science and an increased

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emphasis on the scientific method were important in science teaching. In 1916, John Deweystated that understanding scientific method is more important than the acquisition ofscientific knowledge. Decades later in 1960, an explicit reference to the nature of sciencewas made by the National Society for the Study of Education when it said: “Science is morethan a collection of isolated and assorted facts…a student should learn something about thecharacter of scientific knowledge, how it has been developed, and how it is used” (Hurd1960, p. 34). The importance of having accurate views of the nature of science continues tobe stressed in science education documents (NRC 1996).

This study adopts the consensus view and definition of the nature of science that has beengenerally accepted among science education researchers and science teacher educators. Thedefinition states that the nature of science encompasses the field of epistemology, an area ofstudy that involves how scientific knowledge is generated and the character of science itself(Lederman 1992; Lederman et al. 2002; Schwartz et al. 2004). McComas provides a morecomprehensive description when he says:

The nature of science is a fertile hybrid arena which blends aspects of various socialstudies of science including the history, sociology, and philosophy of science combinedwith research from the cognitive sciences such as psychology into a rich description ofwhat science is, how it works, how scientists operate as a social group and how societyitself both directs and reacts to scientific endeavors. Through multiple lenses, the natureof science describes how science functions. (McComas 1998, pp. 4–5)

Lederman, McComas, and colleagues feel there are between seven and ten key conceptsor tenets associated with having an accurate understanding of the nature of science. Twoexamples of these tenets would be: (1) creativity and imagination are important at all stagesof scientific work, and (2) hypotheses, theories, and laws are not part of a hierarchialstructure and the three concepts represent different kinds of knowledge (McComas 2004).Sometimes criticism is levied at this list of tenets because it is perceived as being toorestrictive. However, the author of this study feels ‘the list’ is a suitable place to start whenfirst introducing the nature of science to prospective elementary teachers, and it doesn’tpreclude discussions of other aspects of the nature of science that may arise during inves-tigations. The most important issue regarding the nature of science, regardless of whatdefinition is embraced, is that the science children learn in schools from their scienceteachers is often not an accurate portrayal of ‘real’ science occurring in laboratories or fieldsettings, or even of how science is used in other professional jobs outside purely scientificcareers. Most science teachers have never worked as scientists and, therefore, they teach theway they were taught and pass on misconceptions to their students. Inadvertently, teacherscan contribute to their students’ disengagement with science and dislike of science.

Nature of Science Instruments

Many researchers use an open-ended instrument called the Views of Nature Of Science–VNOS (Lederman et al. 2002) to assess understandings of the nature of science. Recentwork that used the VNOS include studies by Akerson et al. (2010), Bektas and Geban(2010), Bell et al. (2011), Donnelly and Argyle (2011), McDonald (2010), Posnanski (2010),Quigley et al. (2011), Schwartz et al. (2010), and Yacoubian and BouJaoude (2010).However, generally, the VNOS can only be used with small sample sizes because the 10open-ended questions (version C of the VNOS) are usually administered in a pretest-posttestdesign along with follow-up interviews, and this results in a large amount of qualitative datathat must be transcribed, analyzed, and coded before any conclusions can be drawn. Also,

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the VNOS was not designed to allow for analyses by inferential statistics. As mentionedearlier, objectives of this study were to investigate associations between understandings ofthe nature of science and classroom learning environment, and, to identify which variablesof the classroom learning environment contribute most to understandings of the nature ofscience. Therefore, this study required a convergent-style instrument allowing for quantitativeanalyses.

Unfortunately, a widely accepted quantitative instrument does not exist. However,Lederman et al. (1998) did list the Nature of Scientific Knowledge Survey–NSKS (Rubbaand Anderson 1978) among several instruments that are “…valid and reliable measures ofthe nature of science by virtue of their focus on one or more ideas that have beentraditionally considered under the label of ‘nature of science,’ as well as their reportedvalidity and reliability data” (p. 334). The NSKS was chosen due to its Likert-style format,its scales that can be individually scored and their close alignment to several aspects of thenature of science seen in other instruments including the VNOS (e.g., Creative,Developmental, and Testable), and because it could be used with the study’s large samplesize (525 prospective elementary teachers). One disadvantage of using the NSKS is that ittends to be repetitive and “Many pairs of items within specific subscales are identical, exceptthat one item is worded negatively” (Lederman et al., p. 339, 1998). Lederman et al. felt thisredundancy could cause participants to reference their previous answers and, therefore,result in inflated reliability estimates.

The NSKS was based on earlier work by Showalter (1974) at the Center for UnifiedScience Education at Ohio State University. Showalter synthesized 15 years of scienceeducation literature relating to the concept of scientific literacy and produced a seven-dimension definition of scientific literacy that guided the development of the NSKS.Rubba and Anderson assessed the reliability and construct validity of the NSKS during itsdevelopment with 595 high school and 354 college students. Construct validity was done bytesting an anticipated difference in understandings of the nature of scientific knowledgebetween two groups of college students. Using an ex post facto design, 40 studentscompleting an introductory philosophy of science course were compared to 125 studentsat the same university completing a biology course for non-science majors. Rubba andAnderson found that the students who had studied philosophy of science had statisticallysignificant higher scores on five of the six scales (p<0.05).

Studies that used the NSKS can be found sporadically throughout the 1980s, 1990s, andearly 21st century. Generally, all studies reveal the difficulties in improving both teachers’and students’ conceptions of the nature of science. The following paragraphs highlight someof the studies and their findings that are significant to the research discussed in this paper.

Lederman and Druger (1985), and Lederman and Zeidler (1987) were the first researchers touse the NSKS in the 1980s. It was used in a pretest-posttest design in conjunction withqualitative methods with 18 biology teachers and 409 of their students. Lederman andcolleagues found that students who showed the greatest conceptual changes regarding thenature of scientific knowledge were in classrooms that had inquiry-oriented questioning, lessrote memorization, and teachers who were pleasant, supportive, and established rapport. Theyalso found that teachers’ conceptions are not related to their students’ views. Meichtry (1992)used four scales from the NSKS to evaluate the Biological Science Curriculum Study—BSCS(1990), an innovative middle school science program. A total of 1,004 students participated inthe BSCS curriculum, while 693 students in another comparable school were taught using amore ‘traditional’ science curriculum. Meichtry established the survey’s validity by conductinga factor analysis of the pretest results (apparently the first time the NSKS was subjected to afactor analysis). She found that students in both groups, prior to and following the treatment,

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possessed less than adequate understandings of all four aspects of scientific knowledge.Lonsbury and Ellis (2002) examined the effectiveness of using historical figures and eventsto learn about the nature of science with 107 biology students. They concluded that incorpo-rating history into a biology course has the potential to increase students’ knowledge related tothe nature of science, without detracting from their acquisition of content knowledge needed forstandardized examinations.Walker and Zeidler (2003) used the ViewsOn Science-Technology-Society–VOSTS (Aikenhead and Ryan 1992) and the VNOS, along with the NSKS as a pretest,with high school students in Florida. The researchers investigated how students’ engagement inan Internet-based unit about genetically-modified food influenced their understanding of thenature of science and their decision-making on the issue. They concluded, “Asmeasured by theNSKS and supported by online nature of science interview questions, the majority of thestudents’ answers reflected adequate conceptions of the tentative, creative, subjective, andsocial aspects of science” (p. 26).

The NSKS has also been used to investigate preservice and inservice teachers’ views ofthe nature of science. Chun and Oliver (2000) analyzed 31 middle school teachers’ changesin self-efficacy and knowledge of the nature of science after participating in summerprofessional development workshops. In comparing pretest and posttest scores for theteachers, the researchers found changes in the posttest were not statistically significant.They concluded that the middle school science teachers’ beliefs were not easily changed,and that the initial level of understanding of the nature of science can affect the degree ofchange in teacher beliefs after an intervention. Gess-Newsome (2002) analyzed journalentries along with using the NSKS in an elementary science methods course that usedexplicit instruction about the nature of science. Results indicated that the preservice teachersacquired a more realistic view of science due to the explicit instruction illustrating keyaspects of the nature of science. Bright and Yore (2002) also conducted a factor analysis ofthe NSKS. Then they used student teacher observations and artifact analysis, and investi-gated changes in views of scientific knowledge of 50 preservice elementary teachers duringa year-long science methods course. They found significant gains on three out of six scaleson the NSKS.

Learning Environments Field

The field of learning environments has a rich history covering close to four decades. Becauseextensive literature reviews have been published elsewhere (Fraser et al. 2010), backgroundon the overall learning environments field will not be reiterated in this paper. Indeed, thefield has a strong theoretical base. The earliest studies can be traced back to Lewin (1936)and Murray (1938), the pioneer social psychologists who first analyzed human environ-ments. Lewin and Murray revealed the many advantages of what they termed ‘beta press’—adescription of the environment as perceived by the people themselves in the environment,particularly in schools and classrooms. More than a dozen learning environment question-naires have evolved since Lewin and Murray’s work. They have been translated into otherlanguages, used in a variety of subject areas, in dozens of countries, and with hundreds ofthousands of students.

Science Laboratory Learning Environments

This study looked at an innovative learning environment that is unusual in a science‘content’ course. A Process Approach to Science combines the laboratory and lecturecomponents of a ‘traditional’ or more typical science course into a single course that is then

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delivered by a single instructor. To assess students’ perceptions of the classroom learningenvironment, two scales, namely Open-Endedness and Material Environment, unique to theScience Laboratory Environment Inventory—SLEI (Fraser et al. 1992) were used. The SLEIscales of Integration and Rule Clarity were not used as they were not important componentsof the course’s learning environment. The two scales from the SLEI were combined withfour scales from What Is Happening In this Class?—WIHIC (Fraser et al. 1996) to produce asingle learning environment instrument.

The SLEI was initially developed and validated for secondary school and universityclassrooms in a large cross-national study that involved six countries–USA, Canada,Australia, England, Israel, and Nigeria (Fraser et al. 1992, 1995; Fraser and Griffiths1992; Fraser and Wilkinson 1993). This study involved 5,447 students and it was the firstresearch in the learning environments field to analyze science laboratory environments. Theauthors reported many interesting and significant findings, and, in particular, they found that:(1) laboratory classes in all six countries were dominated by closed-ended activities, (2) theSLEI can differentiate between psychosocial perceptions of students in different classrooms,and (3) the actual form of the SLEI (used in this study) can predict student outcomes interms of attitudinal behavior, with the exception of Open-Endedness for some sub-samples.

The SLEI is often used in combination with other instruments such as those assessingattitudes towards science. McRobbie and Fraser (1993) used a refined version of the SLEI inBrisbane, Australia, with chemistry students to conduct the first study of student outcome(attitude)–laboratory environment associations. Henderson et al. (2000) specifically lookedat biology classrooms in Tasmania and used the SLEI, the Questionnaire on TeacherInteraction (QTI) (Créton et al. 1990; Wubbels and Levy 1993), and Fraser’s (1981) Testof Science-Related Attitudes. Another smaller study compared biology, chemistry, andphysics laboratories in Tasmania (Fisher et al. 1998) and found that the SLEI can distinguishbetween the three disciplines’ learning environments. Hofstein et al. (2001) used the SLEIand analyzed inquiry-style laboratories in chemistry classrooms in Israel, and comparedthem with a control group experiencing closed-ended activities. They found significantdifferences between the two groups, namely, that the scales of Open-Endedness andMaterial Environment were scored higher for the inquiry group, while Integration washigher for the control group. Another study in Israel compared biology and chemistrylaboratory environments (Hofstein et al. 1996). This study confirmed Fisher et al.’s (1998)finding that the SLEI can distinguish between scientific disciplines for some scales. Forexample, biology students perceived their laboratory environment as being more open-endedcompared to the chemistry students.

The SLEI has also been popular in several Asian countries. Wong and Fraser (1996)cross-validated the SLEI in Singaporean chemistry classrooms and found interesting simi-larities with the six-country cross-national study mentioned earlier. For example, they foundthat the preferred scores were slightly higher than actual scores, that females viewed thechemistry learning environment more favorably than males (except Open-Endedness), andthat there were positive associations between learning environment and attitudinal outcomes(again, except for Open-Endedness). In terms of differences, chemistry classrooms inSingapore have higher levels of Rule Clarity and lower levels of Integration and MaterialEnvironment than Australian, American, Canadian, and Israeli classes. Open-Endedness wasrated lower in Singapore compared to Australia, USA, and Canada, but not as low as inIsrael. Giddings and Waldrip (1996) compared laboratory environments in Asia, Australia,the South Pacific, and the U.S., and again, the SLEI was found to be valid and reliable acrossdiverse cultures as represented by the 12 countries involved in the study. Lang et al. (2005)studied gifted chemistry students in Singapore, and Riah and Fraser (1998) cross-validated

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the English version of the SLEI with chemistry students in Brunei Darussalem. A translatedversion of the SLEI has been used in Korea (Kim and Kim 1995, 1996; Kim and Lee 1997;Lee and Fraser 2002; Fraser and Lee 2009), in which strong factorial validity was reportedand similar patterns from other learning environment research were replicated (e.g., lowOpen-Endedness scores and significant associations with attitudes).

What Is Happening In this Class?

The learning environment in the course was also assessed using four scales from What IsHappening In this Class?—WIHIC, namely, Student Cohesiveness, Teacher Support,Investigation, and Cooperation. WIHIC has been found to be consistently reliable and validacross several subject areas and in several countries. It has been used to investigate sciencelearning environments in Australia, Taiwan, Brunei, United States, South Africa, andCanada (Aldridge and Fraser 2000; Aldridge et al. 1999; Moss and Fraser 2002; Riah andFraser 1998; Seopa et al. 2003; Zandvliet and Fraser 2004), mathematics in Indonesia(Margianti et al. 2002), mathematics and geography in Singapore (Fraser and Chionh2000), and mathematics and science classrooms in which laptop computers are used inCanada (Raaflaub and Fraser 2003). In addition, large cross-national validations of theWIHIC have been conducted. Dorman (2003) used confirmatory factor analysis andassessed learning environment perceptions with close to 4,000 mathematics and sciencehigh school students from Australia, the UK and Canada. Fraser et al. (2010) cross-validatedthe WIHIC in Indonesia with 1,161 secondary science students and investigated differencesbetween Indonesia and Australia, and between sexes in their perceptions of the classroomenvironment. The researchers confirmed the validity and reliability of the WIHIC, and thefinding that females generally perceive their learning environment more favorably thanmales was replicated from previous studies.

Nature of Science in a Learning Environment Context

A curriculum development project called Harvard Project Physics is noteworthy in relationto this study because it linked the nature of science and learning environments research.During the late 1960s, Harvard Project Physics was an innovative, new curriculum thatincluded a historical and philosophical examination of physics knowledge generation using acase-study approach. It sparked the creation of the first instrument called the LearningEnvironment Inventory–LEI (Walberg and Anderson 1968) that went on to lead the wayfor the emerging learning environments field.

A second study is the only published research that investigated relationships betweenclassroom variables (several that describe the learning environment) and understandings ofthe nature of science. As mentioned in an earlier section, Lederman and Druger (1985) andLederman and Zeidler (1987) used the Nature of Scientific Knowledge Survey—NSKS andpublished two accounts of the results. The focus was slightly different in each study and,therefore, different conclusions were emphasized. The purpose of the Lederman and Zeidler(1987) study was to test the assumption that a teacher’s conception of the nature of sciencedirectly influences his or her classroom behavior. After “systematic pairwise qualitativecomparisons” (p. 724) were made with field notes collected during observations of theteachers, 44 classroom variables were generated that appeared to discriminate among thebehaviors of the teachers. Six of the teachers’ ‘content-specific characteristics’ identified asclassroom variables included “Amoral, Creativity, Developmental, Parsimony, Testable, andUnified” (p. 730), directly corresponding to the scales on the NSKS. Examples of variables

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that were identified as teachers’ ‘non-instructional characteristics/attitude’ included “de-meanor and impersonal”, while classroom environment variables included “down time,low anxiety, and rapport” (p. 730). Relationships were determined between the classroomvariables and teachers’ conceptions of the nature of science by ranking the teachers based onthe mean of the pretest and posttest scores on the NSKS. The authors reported that only oneclassroom variable (down time) significantly differentiated between the teachers. In theLederman and Druger (1985) study, the researchers used an overall score and theDevelopmental scale from the NSKS to evaluate relationships between classroom variablesand students’ conceptions of the nature of science. They reported that “the data do notsupport the contention that a teacher’s conception of the nature of science, in and of itself, issignificantly correlated with changes in his/her students’ conceptions of science” (p. 655).They concluded, therefore, that “specific teacher behaviors and other classroom variablesmust play an important role in determining any changes in conceptions of students” (p. 657).Lederman and Druger (1985) identified generally successful classrooms in which studentsexhibited the greatest conceptual changes as having “active participation, frequent, inquiry-oriented questioning and problem-solving with little emphasis on rote memorization, teacherswho were more supportive, pleasant, and humorous, and who used anecdotes to aid instructionand establish rapport” (p. 657–661).

The above paragraphs reveal the existence of prior work on the nature of science in alearning environment context. Nature of science research can benefit from a consideration ofvariables in the affective domain that may promote better understanding of scientificpractices. Learning environment research can benefit by exploring associations with astudent outcome that has not been investigated in the past.

Method

Participants

Participants were 525 female prospective elementary teachers enrolled in 27 classes of ascience capstone course called A Process Approach to Science. Most were full-time studentspursuing a Bachelor of Arts degree with a major in Liberal Studies. Students usually take thescience course in their senior or fourth year before applying to a teacher credential programin which they can earn an elementary school teaching credential.

Class size was small and ranged from 14–32 students, with an average of 24.5 studentsduring the four semesters when data were collected. Although there were, on average, one tothree male students in each class, the males were not included in this study in order to controlthe variable of gender. Average age of the female students was approximately 24 years, witha median age of 23 years, and a range from 20 to 52 years of age.

Data Collection

The Nature of Scientific Knowledge Survey–NSKS was used to assess understandings of thenature of science. It has six scales, each with eight items, for a total of 48 items. The NSKSwas originally developed using Showalter’s (1974) factors that describe the nature of sciencethat he named Amoral, Creative, Developmental, Parsimonious, Testable, and Unified.

Table 1 provides a description of the four scales from the NSKS that were used in thestudy (two scales were dropped due to their weak structure following factor analysis) alongwith a sample item. Groups of six items were arranged in a cyclic fashion throughout the

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instrument. Scale names were not identified on the survey. Response options consisted ofStrongly Disagree, Disagree, Neutral, Agree, and Strongly Agree, which were scored 1–5,respectively.

As acknowledged earlier, one disadvantage in using the NSKS is that it tends to berepetitive. Also, many items are negatively worded and contain the word ‘not’. Becausemany of the prospective elementary teachers were from various ethnic and cultural back-grounds, and many had learned English as a second language, not was underlined and placedin a bold face font to assist the students in answering the survey accurately.

To assess the classroom learning environment, two scales from the Science LaboratoryEnvironment Inventory–SLEI and four scales from What Is Happening In this Classroom?–WIHIC were combined producing a total of 46 items. SLEI scales included Open-Endednessand Material Environment, each with seven items. Four of the items from these scales werenegatively worded. Scales used from the WIHIC were Student Cohesiveness, InstructorSupport, Investigation, and Cooperation with eight items per scale. All items were positivelyworded. Response options were slightly different from the NSKS and consisted of AlmostNever, Seldom, Sometimes, Often, and Almost Always corresponding to the scores of 1 to 5.Table 2 provides a description of the classroom learning environment scales along with asample item.

In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted with a convenience sample of twoclasses of students (n035) during the last week of classes. Although over a dozen different

Table 1 Descriptive information and a sample item for scales used from the Nature of Scientific KnowledgeSurvey

Scale Name Description Sample Item

Amoral Scientific knowledge provides people with manycapabilities, but does not instruct people on howto use them. Moral judgment can be passed onlyon people’s application of scientific knowledge,not on the knowledge itself.

The applications of scientific knowledgecan be judged good or bad; but theknowledge itself cannot.

Creative Scientific knowledge is a product of the humanintellect. Its invention requires as much creativeimagination as does the work of an artist, a poet,or a composer. Scientific knowledge embodiesthe creative essence of the scientific inquiryprocess.

Scientific laws, theories, and conceptsdo not express creativity.

Testable Scientific knowledge must be capable of publicempirical testing. Its validity is established throughrepeated testing against accepted observations.Consistency among test results is a necessary, butnot a sufficient condition for the validity of scientificknowledge.

The evidence for scientific knowledgemust be repeatable.

Unified Scientific knowledge is born out of an effort tounderstand the unity of nature. The knowledgeproduced by the various specialized sciencescontribute to a network of laws, theories, andconcepts. This systemized body gives scienceits explanatory and predictive power.

Relationships among laws, theories,and concepts of science do notcontribute to the explanatory andpredictive power of science.

From Rubba and Anderson (1978), p. 456. Response options were Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Neutral,Agree, and Strongly Agree, which were scored 1–5, respectively.

The NSKS scales of Developmental and Parsimonious were omitted due to their weak structure followingfactor analysis.

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questions were asked as part of a larger study (Martin-Dunlop and Fraser 2012), fivequestions were relevant to this study’s objectives. These questions included:

(1) What was the biggest difference between your previous science laboratory class andthis course?

(2) (a) Would you have preferred more, less, or the same level of open-endedness in thiscourse? (b) Can you explain why you feel this way?

(3) How did the level of open-endedness in your previous science laboratory coursecompare to this course?

(4) Can you give me an example during the Antarctic Seabird Project when youmight have feltlike a scientist? (The Antarctic Seabird Project is a culminating assignment in the courserequiring students to use actual scientific data collected by a biologist in the department.)

(5) Do you have an example of an ‘aha’ moment when you understood something aboutscientific work that you had not previously realized?

Data Analyses

An exploratory factor analysis (Coakes and Steed 2003) was conducted on the NSKS andthe science learning environment questionnaire. Items that had factor loadings less than 0.30on the NSKS and less than 0.40 on the WIHIC/SLEI scales were omitted from furtheranalysis. Remaining items were used to calculate internal reliability and reported asCronbach (1950) alpha coefficients for each scale.

Table 2 Descriptive information and a sample item from each classroom learning environment scale

Scale Name Description Sample Item

What Is Happening In This Class?

Student Cohesiveness Extent to which students know,help and are supportive of one another.

I worked well with other students. (+)

Instructor Support Extent to which the instructorhelps, befriends, trusts, andshows interest in students.

The instructor’s questions helped meto understand. (+)

Investigation Emphasis on the skills andprocesses of inquiry andtheir use in problem solvingand investigation.

I found out answers to questions bydoing investigations. (+)

Cooperation Extent to which studentscooperate rather than competewith one another on learning tasks.

When I worked in groups, there wasteamwork. (+)

Science Laboratory Environment Inventory

Open-Endedness Extent to which the laboratoryactivities emphasize anopen-ended divergent approachto experimentation.

The instructor decided the best wayfor me to carry out the laboratoryexperiments. (−)

Material Environment Extent to which the laboratoryequipment and materials are adequate.

The laboratory equipment that I usedwas in poor working order. (−)

Items designated (+) are scored 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, respectively, for the responses Almost Never, Seldom,Sometimes, Often, and Almost Always.

Items designated (−) are scored 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1, respectively, for the responses Almost Never, Seldom,

Sometimes, Often, and Almost Always.

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Understandings of the nature of science were assessed using a pretest-posttest design.Perceptions of the classroom learning environment were determined by administering thesurvey during the last week of classes. Average item means for each scale and standarddeviations were calculated.

To investigate associations between the learning environment and understandings of thenature of science on the posttest, simple correlation and multiple regression analyses werecarried out. To determine which specific learning environment scales accounted for most ofthe variance in understanding the nature of science, standardized regression weights werealso examined.

Responses to the interview questions were audio-taped, transcribed, and coded by ananalytic inductive process (Anderson 1998). This involved reviewing the transcripts multipletimes, pulling out key phrases describing the learning environment and aspects of the natureof science that tended to reoccur, then reducing these phrases to concise themes thatsummarized the responses and helped to answer the research questions.

Results

Factor Analysis

Table 3 shows the results of the factor analysis for the NSKS. Only four of the six scaleswere retained for further analysis–Creative, Testable, Unified, and Amoral. These scales hadfactor loadings of at least 0.30 with their own scale and less than 0.30 on all other scales.Parsimonious and Developmental were omitted because they did not meet these criteria.Consequently, only 27 of the original 48 items were retained for further analysis. Results ofthe factor analysis were comparable to Bright and Yore’s (2002) study in British Columbia,Canada with preservice elementary teachers.

A detailed discussion of the factor analysis of the scales that were used to assess the scienceclassroom learning environment has been published elsewhere and, therefore, will not be restatedin this paper (Martin-Dunlop and Fraser 2007). In summary, results replicated considerable priorresearch and attest to the robustness of all six scales. Only three items out of the possible 46 hadfactor loadings less than 0.40 (one item from Open-Endedness and two items from MaterialEnvironment).

Reliability and Variance

Internal reliability of the four NSKS scales are indicated below the factor loadings inTable 3. Values of the alpha coefficients ranged from 0.66 for Amoral to 0.85 forCreative. Internal consistency reliability of all classroom learning environment scales wasstrong and values for all scales are reported in Martin-Dunlop and Fraser (2007). Alphacoefficients ranged from 0.67 for Cooperation to 0.95 for Instructor Support. Percentage ofvariance for the posttest administration of the NSKS varied from 2.53% to 14.31%, with atotal variance of 25.89%. Eigenvalues ranged from 1.21 to 6.87.

Nature of Science and Perceptions of the Learning Environment

Descriptive statistics assessing students’ understandings of the nature of science at the beginningand at the completion of the course are provided in Table 4. Changes between pretest-posttestscores were statistically significant (p<0.01) for Creative and Unified.

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Descriptive statistics assessing students’ perceptions of the classroom learning environmentare provided in Table 4 as well. Mean scores ranged from 3.85 for Open-Endedness to 4.72 forCooperation. Five out of the six scales had mean scores between 4.00 and 5.00, indicating thatthe students perceived the factors that describe a positive classroom learning environment asoccurring Often to Almost Always during the course. Only Open-Endedness had a score below4.00, although a mean score of 3.85 is relatively high compared to other published studies thatassessed students’ perceptions of the level of Open-Endedness.

Interview Responses

After the responses from the interviews with 35 students were transcribed and coded, fivethemes emerged. However, only responses that commented on the learning environment or

Table 3 Factor loadings for fourscales on the posttest administrationof the Nature of Scientific Knowl-edge Survey using the individual asthe unit of analysis

Factor loadings smaller than 0.30are not included. Consequently,21 of the 48 original items in theNSKS were omitted from furtheranalysis.

Factor Loadings

Item No. Creative Testable Unified Amoral

2 0.62

8 0.73

14 0.71

20 0.56

26 0.74

32 0.59

38 0.72

5 0.34

11 0.36

17 0.35

23 0.55

29 0.65

35 0.51

41 0.59

6 0.74

12 0.73

18 0.70

30 0.31 –

36 0.40

42 0.34

48 0.35 0.51

7 0.53

13 0.40

19 0.44

25 0.31

31 0.30

43 0.65

% Variance 14.31 5.47 3.58 2.53

Eigenvalue 6.87 2.63 1.72 1.21

Reliability 0.85 0.71 0.71 0.66

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understandings of the nature of science, and those that suggested a connection between thetwo are quoted below.

In response to the question, “What was the biggest difference between your previous sciencelaboratory class and this course?” the idea of ‘inquiry-based science’ was predominant. Eachquote below is from a different student.

We had a laboratory once aweek and inmy laboratory class it was totally a convergent wayof thinking–the directions were all on the board the second we walked in. I was thinking,what is the point of me doing this if everybody already knows the answer. So I foundmyself speeding through it just to get it done so I could get out of there. This class was verydivergent. We were given our experiment but we weren’t told how to do it, we weren’t toldan order, we weren’t told what we should come up with at the end. It was basically hereyou go, have fun, tell me what you think and then describe the process. [Student 1]With this class wewere able to do our own experiments.Weweren’t given a data sheet. Inother classes, we had a set of instructions that we had to do and we really just did themand left the class and that’s all we did [In this class] I think we had more power over ourexperiments this way than just having a right or wrong answer. I know with our plantexperiment that some things went wrong but we learned from that. [Student 2]

A series of questions asked, “Would you have preferred more, less, or the same level ofopen-endedness in this course? Can you explain why you feel this way? How did the level ofopen–endedness in your previous science laboratory course compare with this course?”Interestingly, all 35 students said they preferred the same level of open-endedness. Examplesfollow (each from a different student).

Table 4 Average item mean and standard deviation for Nature of Scientific Knowledge Survey (NSKS) andlearning environment scales, and differences (effect size and t-test for paired samples) for NSKS using theclass mean as the unit of analysis

Scale Average Item Mean Average Item Standard Deviation Difference

Pretest Posttest Pretest Posttest Effect Size t

NSKS

Creative 3.42 3.83 0.18 0.22 2.05 9.62**

Testable 4.00 4.05 0.14 0.12 0.38 1.89

Unified 3.82 4.02 0.12 0.12 1.67 7.93**

Amoral 3.28 3.30 0.16 0.17 0.12 0.39

Learning Environment

Student Cohesiveness 4.44 0.21

Instructor Support 4.20 0.40

Investigation 4.41 0.22

Cooperation 4.72 0.16

Open-Endedness 3.85 0.22

Material Environment 4.40 0.17

**p<0.01

For the NSKS, the response key was: 1 = Strongly Disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Neutral, 4 = Agree, 5 = Strongly Agree

For the learning environment scales, the response key was: 1 = Almost Never, 2 = Seldom, 3 = Sometimes,4 = Often, 5 = Almost Always.

N=525 female prospective elementary teachers in 27 classes

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I feel we had a great deal of open-endedness. I think it helped us to understand why wedo experiments in real science and the nature of science. I don’t think we needed moreper se, because without a certain amount of instruction we would have been lost.[Researcher: “You mentioned open-endedness and related it to the nature of science.What do you mean by that?”] Because in real science you don’t have strict guidelinesthat you have to follow. Real scientists come up with questions that they want toanswer and that’s how information comes about. They research it and collect new data.That’s the open-endedness of it. That’s why we do it because that’s how scientists doit. [Student 4]You know that’s a tough question for me because most of my prior classes didn’t haveany open-endedness. So I felt like there was quite a bit. Was it too much? I don’t thinkit was too much. Could there have been more? Very possibly there could have beenbut, since I haven’t been exposed to it, it’s hard for me to say. I really, really like thefact that we did have as much open-endedness because I felt like I had a personal stakein it. [Student 5]Well, probably the same [level of open-endedness in this course]. It helped my self-esteem.[Student 7]

More explicit nature of science questions were: “Can you give me an example during theAntarctic Seabird Project when you might have felt like a scientist? Do you have an exampleof an ‘aha’ moment when you understood something about scientific work that you had notpreviously realized?” All of the students’ responses provided specific examples about howthey had gained new nature of science knowledge and understandings. The key point thatemerged from the responses was the importance of authenticity in experiments and investigationsto promote this understanding. For example:

That probably made me feel like a real scientist— just being able to communicate withgroup members and looking at our graph and discussing our different ideas and havingto try to figure it out by myself, because we couldn’t really come to a conclusion.[Student 9]I felt like a scientist analyzing data. I mean observations can be conducted in the lab,out of the lab, anywhere but, once you have your observations, you have to analyzethem and find out what’s useful and what’s not. [Student 10][Felt like a scientist when…] We were working with actual data that had beencollected from the field versus an experiment that we set up in the classroom. Wetook his data from the real world and so there’s more mistakes and there’s more thingsthat affect it like the weather. [Student 11][Felt like a scientist…] When we came to our conclusion and we had actually provenour researchable question, it was really refreshing to know that we were going out forsomething and trying to test something. We didn’t actually prove it, we can’t reallyprove something, but we had evidence to support our researchable question. [ahamoment?] When we were talking about the absolute size and the relative size of thetwo seabirds, we found it shocking that the smaller bird had a larger relative size for itswing. [Student 12]

Although an interview question was not asked specifically about a possible relationshipbetween improved understanding of the nature of science and a positive learning environ-ment, the above quotes do suggest that an appropriate level of open-endedness, usingauthentic data that needs to be analyzed and graphed, and working in a cooperative grouplike a team of scientists might do, helped the students move in the desired direction of having

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a more realistic view of the nature of science. The importance of ‘setting the stage’ in order tocreate a learning environment that allows students to have ‘aha moments’ during a long-terminvestigation cannot be overlooked. Having a realistic view of the nature of science is a giant‘aha’ moment—and a positive learning environment seems to be instrumental in the process.

Associations Between Understanding the Nature of Science and Learning Environment

The results of the simple correlation and multiple regression analyses are reported in Table 5.The values indicate moderate simple correlations between the four aspects of the nature ofscience and the learning environment. Testable and Unified were positively correlated with allsix learning environment scales and all associations were statistically significant (p<0.01).Also, Creative was significantly positively correlated with Instructor Support (p<0.05),Investigation, Open-Endedness, and Material Environment (p<0.01).

Table 5 also indicates a statistically significant multiple correlation between the combinedlearning environment scales and Creative (R00.22; p<0.01), Testable (R00.29; p<0.01),and Unified (R00.27; p<0.01) on the NSKS. Because the multiple correlations werestatistically significant for these three scales, the standardized regression coefficients wereexamined to identify which individual learning environment scales were most influential.

Open-Endedness and Material Environment were significant independent predictors of theCreative scale, while Cooperation, Open-Endedness andMaterial Environment were significantindependent predictors of the Testable scale. Material Environment was a significant indepen-dent predictor of the Unified scale. The two highest standard regression coefficient values werefor the associations between Unified andMaterial Environment (β00.17; p<0.01) and betweenCreative and Open-Endedness (β00.16; p<0.05). All significant regression coefficients werepositive, confirming a positive link between a favorable classroom learning environment andthe student outcome of understanding the nature of science.

Discussion and Conclusion

This study makes a significant contribution to science education research because it extendsearlier work that attempted to build a bridge between the assessment of an innovative

Table 5 Simple correlation and multiple regression analyses for associations between the classroom learningenvironment and understanding the nature of science

Scale Creative Testable Unified Amoral

r β r β r β r β

Student Cohesiveness 0.05 −0.00 0.16** 0.03 0.14** 0.07 −0.02 −0.01Instructor Support 0.11* 0.01 0.16** 0.01 0.12** −0.02 0.04 0.02

Investigation 0.12** 0.03 0.21** 0.08 0.17** 0.10 0.04 0.04

Cooperation 0.06 −0.02 0.22** 0.12* 0.15** 0.03 −0.05 −0.09Open-Endedness 0.19** 0.16** 0.19** 0.10* 0.13** 0.05 0.06 0.04

Material Environment 0.13** 0.11* 0.16** 0.10* 0.21** 0.17** 0.05 0.06

Multiple Correlation (R) 0.22** 0.29** 0.27** 0.11

*p<0.05 **p<0.01 N0525 female prospective elementary teachers in 27 classes.

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learning environment and understanding of the nature of science (Walberg and Anderson1968). Lederman and Druger (1985), and Lederman and Zeidler (1987) attempted to identifyclassroom variables that influence improved understandings of the nature of science insecondary school biology classrooms, but they did not use any of the learning environmentinstruments available during the 1980s. This study supports the notion that a favorablelearning environment can have a positive impact on an area of cognitive achievement notpreviously investigated.

This study is only the fourth study (Bright and Yore 2002; McRobbie and Fraser 1993;Meichtry 1992) that has conducted a factor analysis of the NSKS. The results of the factoranalysis support the earlier studies in that not all scales are factorially strong. However, whenfaulty items are removed, internal reliability of the remaining scales is satisfactory.Consequently, this study’s first research objective—to develop valid and reliable measuresof prospective elementary teachers’ understandings of the nature of science—was attained.Although the NSKS has been criticized in the past, it can still be used when researchers wishto use a forced-choice, convergent-style instrument for a quantitative study. Most signifi-cantly, the NSKS can be used with large samples, an issue particularly important consideringthe current educational trend of engaging in large-scale studies that measure and assessstudent outcomes in science.

The second objective of this study—to investigate associations between understand-ings of the nature of science and the classroom learning environment—revealed mod-erate correlations during the quantitative analyses segment. Many of the associationsbetween the four tenets assessed by the NSKS and the learning environment werepositive and statistically significant. The qualitative data, in the form of the prospectiveelementary teachers’ responses to the interview questions, suggested a stronger linkbetween a favorable learning environment (particularly for Open-Endedness andCooperation) and improved understandings of the nature of science than the surveyresults.

The third objective of the study was to identify which variables of the classroom learningenvironment contribute most to understandings of the nature of science. Based on thecorrelational and multiple regression analyses as well as the interview responses, twofeatures of a positive learning environment stand out—open-endedness and cooperation.Open-Endedness was a significant independent predictor of both the Creative and Testablescales, while Cooperation was a significant independent predictor of the Testable scale onthe NSKS. Conducting open-ended investigations and encouraging cooperation is crucial ifwe want students to know how to collect their own data, how to set up appropriateprocedures, how to analyze evidence, and how to interpret results—all skills built-in tounderstanding the nature of science. Effective peer-to-peer learning was evident becausestudents rated the level of cooperation in the course as very high. The scale of Cooperationhad an average item mean of 4.72, the highest among the six factors assessing the learningenvironment.

Science teachers and science teacher educators sometimes forget how powerful affectivefactors can be during the learning process. It only makes logical sense that a positivelearning environment helps students to learn, regardless of the content being learned.Nevertheless, learning and understanding the nature of science is a challenge due to itsabstractness, and deep understanding may be difficult if students have only experiencedtraditional science classes that rely on rote memorization and laboratory experiments thatrequire convergent thinking. This study suggests that both cognitive and affective variablesmust be considered and attended to if we want to improve the teaching and learning of thenature of science. This has implications for teaching the nature of science at all levels

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because past studies have mainly focused on evaluating instructional interventions and donot take a broader view of the entire learning environment.

Exploring the juxtaposition between two seemingly unrelated research fields is unusual.This is the only study to investigate perceptions of the learning environment along withunderstandings of the nature of science and, consequently, there are still many unansweredquestions. For example, how can we assess students’ understanding that “science is acooperative social endeavor” in future studies? In what way could a focus on improvingcooperation in the classroom environment lead to a better understanding of some aspects ofthe nature of science that were not investigated in this study such as scientific tentativeness,the difference between observations and inferences, or habits of mind? In the learningenvironments field, what other instruments could be used to examine associations withunderstanding the nature of science? For example, how could the Questionnaire on TeacherInteraction—QTI (Créton et al. 1990; Wubbels and Levy 1993) be used to bring closercongruence between a teacher’s stated conceptions of the nature of science (assuming theyare accurate) and teaching behaviors exhibited in the classroom that best cultivate under-standing in students as well?

Teaching the nature of science is not an easy task—it’s like navigating a bumpy road.However, when an appropriate level of open-endedness is created, a supportive and encour-aging instructor serves as a facilitator, and when cooperation between students is encour-aged, a positive learning environment can flatten some of those bumps along the way.

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Res Sci Educ

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