"You can't believe in a theory that's wrong": High school students' ideas about theories and theory change

This study explores whether and how high school students in an introductory biology course changed their beliefs about the nature of science, and especially theory change, over the course of a four-week, technology-supported inquiry unit on evolution and natural selection. Curricular and technological scaffolds supported students’ construction and evaluation of causal explanations as the products of their inquiry. Before and after the study a sample of 8 students were given the Nature of Science Interview, developed by Carey and her colleagues, to assess their beliefs about the nature of scientific work, the role of experiments and ideas in theory construction, and how scientific theories change through experimentation. Our analyses extend previous work by Carey and colleagues to elaborate themes in students’ responses to questions concerning the nature of theories, the relations between ideas and experiments, and how experiments lead to theory change. We found that students beliefs did not change over the course of the intervention, and in general students held a view of science as a search for "right" answers or explanations about the world. Students commonly see theories as proven hypotheses, rather than as larger explanatory frameworks, although they show a trend toward developing more sophisticated views about theories as a result of their own theoretically-grounded efforts to explain events. We discuss apparent contradictions between students' stated ideas about science and their own scientific practice, how our findings relate to previous work, and questions raised by our analyses about how to assess students' scientific epistemologies. Beliefs about theory change 1