High School Students’ Questions About Science and Religion in School Debates with Scientists

Ana Cristina Torres,Ana Mouraz,João Paiva

doi:10.29333/ejmste/10864

Abstract

The paper describes an analysis of the questions posed by high school students regarding relationships between science and religion in a series of debates with scientists in public high schools of the northern part of Portugal. The exploratory interpretation of 171 collected anonymous written questions allowed for the detection of fragilities in the students’ ideas about the nature of science and the nature of religion, connected with a trend to reject religion using scientism arguments. The findings reinforce a need of revising the fragmented teaching of nature of science and its connections with religion towards a more contextualized approach of diversified episodes of these social endeavours, anchored in life’s ‘big questions’ that allow students to make cross-disciplinary connections. Our analysis also supports the need for more research on students’ questions rather than on students’ answers in more common research methodologies conducted to inform the development of a more meaningful curriculum.

Highlights

This paper reports on an analysis of high school students’ questions posed in debates to stimulate reflection and dialogue on science and religion describing their views and doubts on themes in the intersection between science and religion
The findings open with a presentation of the main categorized themes in the students’ written questions moving, afterwards, to a summary of the predisposition to science or to religion detected on the analysed questions
Students often referred to known episodes of the history of Catholic influence in scientific developments, those which are presently addressed in lower secondary curriculum sciences subjects, being the Galileo’s conflict with the Catholic Church due to the Heliocentric Theory the most common

Summary

Introduction

This paper reports on an analysis of high school students’ questions posed in debates to stimulate reflection and dialogue on science and religion describing their views and doubts on themes in the intersection between science and religion. A common ground is that science learning benefits from teaching strategies deeply embedded in nature of science issues (Lederman, 2007) and from more context-based approaches (Bennett, Lubben, & Hogarth, 2007), giving place to recent movements towards a cross-disciplinary science-technology-engineering-mathematics (STEM) perspective, slowly evolving to a wider STEAM movement, when accounting for the arts These are built upon a post-positivist view of scientific inquiry that highlights its changing nature, and a constructivist view of scientific knowledge described by Lederman (2007) as being tentative, empirically based, subjective, socially and culturally embedded and involving human inference, imagination and creativity. Research shows that most curricula and teaching practices are historically shaped by a positivist limited approach, either through the rigid set of school subjects, or through the epistemic approaches that shape them (Goodson, 2005)

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Conclusion