Chinese Journal of Science Education


Vol. 17 No. 2 , Pages 93 - 109 , 2009

The Effect of Inclusion of History of Science on Senior High Students’ Understanding of the Nature of Science, Attitudes toward Science, and Academic Achievement (Article written in Chinese)

Chen-Yung LIN, Yung-Ta CHANG, & Jun-Hui CHENG

Abstract

In this paper, history of science was integrated into science teaching in order to improve high school students’ understanding of nature of science, attitudes toward science, and academic achievement in genetics. Rather than one episode or two of history of science used in previous research, our teaching material in study, Looking for Double Helix from Peas, conveys nearly 20 episodes of history of science and covers more than 60 years. The teaching material was all about the development of molecular genetics and was developed to demonstrate the dynamic interaction among scientific activities, knowledge, and community. The research was conducted in a summer class at a girls’ senior high school in the city of Taipei. The study involved 234 students, in six classes, entering grade twelve. Of these, three classes were the experimental group and the other three classes were the control group. It was found that experimental classes performed significantly better than control group classes in understanding of nature of science and attitudes toward science. However, there was no statistical difference between the classes in genetic achievement. Further analysis on students’ feedback, drawn from a website about the integration of history of science in science teaching, was particularly able to improve students’ understanding of the dynamic processes of scientific knowledge development and the interaction between scientists and the scientific community.

Keywords: history of science; history of genetics; nature of science; attitudes toward science

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