What Went Wrong? Literature Students are More Informed About the Nature of Science than Science Students

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate science-math (SM) and literature-math (LM) branches of high school students’ views on NOS and to compare their beliefs about NOS. The study’s sample consisted of 120 Turkish 11th grade students (60 in the science-math branch and 60 in the literature-math branch). Some significant differences were found between science-math and literature-math students’ conceptions of NOS. The results indicate that compared to sciencemath branch students, literature-math branch students seemed to be more informed about the tentativeness of scientific knowledge, arriving at scientific knowledge, differences in scientific knowledge and scientific opinion. The results of this study introduce one of the reasons why science-math students enroll in courses on history of science and philosophy of science during high school.