Abstract
This interpretivist qualitative study investigated the teachers’ understanding of the nature of science (NOS). The participants comprised 12 Physical Sciences teachers from the Badplaas Circuit in the Mpumalanga Province of South Africa. The participants were selected from 8 secondary schools by using convenience sampling and purposive sampling. Data was obtained by using the Views of the Nature of Science (VNOS) Questionnaire (Form C) developed by Abd-El-Khalick, Lederman, Bell and Schwartz (2002), which consist of 10 open-ended questions. The interview data was obtained by using semi-structured questions adapted from Abd-El-Khalick (1998). All the teachers included in the sample were engaged in teaching Physical Sciences at secondary level. Participants’ responses, based on questionnaire and interview data, was coded as either naïve, transitional (-), transitional (+) or informed. The following tenets of the nature of science were coded for: scientific knowledge is tentative; empirical; theory-laden; partly the product of human inference; imaginative and creative; socially and culturally embedded; that there is a distinction between observation and inference; that there is no universal recipe-like method for doing science; and that there is a distinction between scientific theories and laws. The analysis of the data revealed that all the participants held naïve to transitional understandings of the nature of science. Recommendations for future research were raised.
M.Ed.