A School of Education Seminar hosted by the Learning Sciences Research Institute

Presented by Professor Sibel Erduran, Professor of Science Education, University of Oxford

Epistemic aspects of science are relatively underemphasised in science teaching and learning. Epistemic aspects of science may include the processes and products of science that concern the development of scientific knowledge. For example, scientists engage in modelling practices in formulating scientific knowledge. Scientists may use epistemic criteria such as objectivity in interpreting data. Epistemic aspects of science demand teachers and students to adopt a meta-perspective on how science works as a knowledge construction enterprise. As such, epistemic processes and products of science can be difficult to understand.

In this presentation, I draw on our work on nature of science (NOS) that capitalises on the use of visual representations to facilitate the understanding of epistemic aspects of science. Based on reviews of literature from philosophy of science, we produced a series of images that summarise some key features of the epistemic aspects of science. For example, we proposed the “Benzene Ring Heuristic” (BRH) inspired from the benzene ring structure as an analogy to highlight the dynamic nature of the epistemic, cognitive and social components of scientific practices. BRH stresses the social mediation of data, models and explanations through argumentation and social certification. In this presentation, I will illustrate how we have used these visual representations in a pre-service science teacher education programme, and what impact they had on pre-service teachers’ own visual representations of epistemic aspects of science.