Students’ Understandings of Science and Scientists

The research reported in the previous chapter (Chap. 5 ) looked mainly at students’ geology content knowledge gains, using different quantitative measures. The research presented in this chapter reflects my qualitative efforts to understand how my students understand the nature of science, in terms of its products and processes. This research is important for two reasons. First, I wanted to see if historically contextualizing scientific content knowledge, as I described earlier in Chap. 3 , and implementing different pedagogical strategies that emphasize the scientific process, which I explored in Chap. 4 , would lead to students developing a more refined understanding for the nature of science (NOS) as both product and process. Secondly, there has only been a handful of studies (8.2%) focused on NOS understandings in post-secondary students (Abd-El-Khalick & Lederman, 2023). This research will add to that small research base. With these reasons as a backdrop, I am asking these two research questions.