Philosophical Views on Science of Major Science Curriculum Documents in USA

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The purpose of this study was to examine philosophical views on science of two influential curriculum documents, AAAS's Benchmarks for Scientific Literacy (Benchmark) and NRC's National Science Education Standards (Standard), and to get educational implications about a desired philosophical view on science at a school science level. In order to determine the philosophical views on science explicitly suggested in the documents, Soh's Philosophical Perspectives Probe (PPP) was used as a framework for analysis. Forty preservice teachers reviewed the documents, extracting paragraphs with which statements of the PPP's questions would agree. The results of the study were as follows: First, the Benchmark's philosophical view on science corresponds to the borderline between inductivism and eclecticism, or eclecticism close to falsificationism. The philosophical positions by the PPP's themes are very different. Second, the Standard's philosophical position on science corresponds to inductivism close to eclecticism. Its philosophical position by the themes of the PPP is very different like the Benchmark. These results indicate that philosophical positions of the documents are more complex than popular conceptions would have it. That is to say, the results suggest that the science curriculum documents hold not only a contemporary philosophical view on science but also a traditional view on science, and that the philosophical positions on science are different from each other by documents and even by the PPP's themes in the same document. The results suggest that the philosophical views on science in school science contexts need to be adjusted and presented to K-12 students according to topics related to philosophy of science.