Describe how someone might teach the topic while explicitly incorporating an idea from the nature of science.

Describe how someone might teach the topic while explicitly incorporating an idea from the nature of science.

“NSTA makes the following declarations for science educators to support teaching NOS. The following premises, as well as the terminology (e.g., tentative, subjective, etc.) of nature of science, are critical and developmentally appropriate (for precollege students). They should be understood by all students by the time they graduate high school. The understandings are elaborated slightly beyond the items listed in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

Scientific knowledge is simultaneously reliable and subject to change. Having confidence in scientific knowledge is reasonable, while also realizing that such knowledge may be abandoned or modified in light of new evidence or a re-conceptualization of prior evidence and knowledge. The history of science reveals both evolutionary and revolutionary changes. With new evidence and interpretation, old ideas are replaced or supplemented by newer ones. Because scientific knowledge is partly the result of inference, creativity, and subjectivity, it is subject to change (AAAS 1993; Kuhn 1962).

Although no single universal step-by-step scientific method captures the complexity of doing science, a number of shared values and perspectives characterize a scientific approach to understanding nature. Among these are a demand for naturalistic explanations supported by empirical evidence that are, at least in principle, testable against the natural world. Other shared elements include observations, rational argument, inference, skepticism, peer review, and reproducibility of the work. This characteristic of science is also a component of the idea that “science is a way of knowing” as distinguished from other ways of knowing (Feyerabend 1975; Moore 1993; NGSS Lead States 2013).

In general, all scientific knowledge is a combination of observations and inferences (Chalmers 1999; Gould 1981). For example, students of all ages pay attention to weather forecasts. Weather forecasters make observations, and their forecasts are inferences. All science textbooks have a picture of the atom, but the picture is really an inference from observable data of how matter behaves.