Prospective primary teachers’ views on the nature of science

Abstract

This article presents the results of a piece of research that analyzed the views on the nature of science (NOS) among student teachers enrolled in programs of Primary Education at two public universities in Spain. Previous studies have reported that science teachers maintain ‘eclectic’ epistemological perspectives on science; in this article, we test if such a hypothesis holds when teachers’ NOS ideas are ‘anchored’ in specific periods and topics of the philosophy of science. We studied 114 prospective teachers attending an undergraduate teaching course with emphasis on the natural sciences at the Universities of Burgos and Valladolid in the period of 2017-18. A Likert-scale questionnaire with 50 items was applied to determine trends in those teachers’ epistemological views on science. The results showed that teachers’ views are mostly correlated with the philosophical period of Logical Positivism/Received View, and to some extent to the period of Recent and Contemporary Accounts. Regarding the classical epistemological topics of correspondence, methodologies, intervention, evolution and representation, teachers’ views could be related to the period of Logical Positivism/Received View and Critical Rationalism, but also to the New Philosophy of Science. The main conclusion of this study is that teachers’ expressed views on NOS are epistemologically eclectic to a much smaller degree when examined with more detail concerning specific periods and topics of the philosophy of science.