This research project was to explore the nature of science, technology, and engineering(NOSTE) in order to integrate the concepts of the NOSTE into the nature of science(NOS) as a key component of scientific literacy, which is the eventual goals of sc ...
This research project was to explore the nature of science, technology, and engineering(NOSTE) in order to integrate the concepts of the NOSTE into the nature of science(NOS) as a key component of scientific literacy, which is the eventual goals of science education. For doing this, the extensive literature review regarding to the NOE and NOT and investigation for the teachers and students’ concepts about the NOS as well as NOT were conducted in some different research design for the past 2 years.
For the first round of year, a variety of literature was reviewed to investigate the concepts of technology and engineering as a first step of project. The results of literature review were presented the four domains of NOE, which are 1. Engineering as Knowledge, 2. Engineering as system, 3. Engineering as an applied object, and 4. Engineering as a social application. Also, the six domains of the NOT that were deduced from the literature review are 1. Technology as Artifacts, 2. Technology as Knowledge, 3. Technology as a Human Practice, 4. Technology as System, 5. The Role of Technology in Society, and 6. History of Technology. Another research conducted for the first year of project was to explore the understanding of the Nature of Science(NOS) for five science teachers while they participated in the biology lab activities using the strategy of Science Writing Heuristic (SWH). The findings are science teachers presented greatly their understandings about the nature of scientific inquiry and scientific thinking while they hardly presented the understandings about the nature of interaction among science, technology and society.
For the second round of year of the project, the study was conducted to investigate the 30 experts’ concepts of NOT based on the six domains of NOT that were presented from the first round of project year. The findings are that the experts’ ideas of NOT emphasized on the NOT 3. Technology as a human practice with approximately 43.5% frequencies of their understandings among the six domains of the NOT. And the experts presented their ideas about the NOT in the domain of 4. Technology as system as well as the NOT 5. The role of Technology in Society with reasonable attentions.
Meanwhile, another research in the second year of project was conducted to explore the conceptions of the Nature of Technology (NOT) of the technical high school students after implementing the history of science and technology course in the classrooms. The results of the study was followed. First, the technical high school students posses a variety of views of the NOT reasonably and in particular, they have a good understanding for the domains of 2. technology as an innovative change and 5. history of technology. Second, overall participating in the course of history of science and technology was effective in understanding the NOT for the technical high school students based on the results of t-test statistic analysis for the survey(<0.05). Third, there is no significant gender differences in the understanding of the NOT among technical high school students(<0.05) but there is significant different among the types of majors of students for the NOT(<0.05).
As such, the research project was quite successful to explore the ideas of the NOE and NOT in order to integrate the findings into the NOS for expanding of the NOS concepts as the NOSTE. However, as the ideas of NOS is complex and abstract as an epistemology of philosophy of science, the concepts of NOT and NOE are also complicated and it was very time consuming for developing the ideas of NOT and NOE. Therefore, more future research in this area should be conducted in a vareity of approaches to come up with the consensus views of the NOSTE as a expanding of NOS concepts, which is the eventual goals of science education for the future generations.