Epistemological conceptions of biology majors and their transformation by an explicit proposal for teaching history and philosophy of science

Abstract

This paper reports the results obtained in the test of a proposal for the teaching of history and philosophy of science to Higher Education students enrolled in courses on natural sciences. The proposal takes actual historical examples as a basis for eliciting discussions about philosophical issues. It amounts to an explicit approach, directly addressing epistemological contents, which was elaborated and tested from the perspective of a teacher-researcher. The proposal was tested through a quali-quantitative approach. Data were gathered in a class of a course on history and philosophy of science for Biology majors, through the questionnaire VNOS-C (Views of the Nature of Science, Form C), at the beginning and end of a term. They were qualitatively treated by analyzing categories built from the answers given by the students. Based on some issues agreed upon by several post-positivist theories of science, we evaluated the adequacy of the students’ epistemological views, obtaining scores for each question, the sum of which resulted in a total score for each questionnaire. The effects of the proposal on the students’ views were analyzed qualitative and quantitatively by means of a discussion of the frequencies of adequate, partially adequate, and inadequate answers to each question and a statistical test comparing the total scores of each student, in the pre- and post-tests. To analyze the effects on each epistemological aspect addressed in the questionnaire, we performed tests comparing the scores obtained by the students in each question, at the beginning and end of the term. Generally speaking, the proposal resulted in an evolution of the views about the nature of science of all students who did both the pre- and posttests. It was more effective in promoting a change in views about the demarcation between science and other ways of knowing, the differences between laws and theories, and the relationship between models and evidence. Nevertheless, it had a more limited success in the case of views about what is an experiment, the requirement of experimental methods in scientific practice, the causes of theoretical change, and the possibility of drawing different conclusions from the same data.