Assessing German professors’ views of nature of science

University professors’ views of nature of science play an important role when guiding undergraduate students into the culture of practicing physicists. While these topics have a long-standing tradition in U.S. curricula they are not part of German educational standards or curricula. Additionally professors’ views—in contrast to those of their students—are relatively under-researched. In this contribution, we establish the possibility of testing German physics professors’ views in an economically administrable survey. We first ask for their views of the nature of science, and then about how important they see these aspects for students and how intensive they address them in their own physics classes at the university. We demonstrate that an established test instrument can be reliably used with this demographic. The results indicate that the professors tend to views of naive empiricism but besides that hold mostly adequate beliefs. Learning about the nature of science in university courses, in general, is considered of much importance, which is also reflected in the professors’ reported teaching habits. However, there are aspects in this area which are considered more or less important by the professors.

Figure 1

Four dimensions of epistemological beliefs according to Hofer and Pintrich [15].

Figure 2

Aspect of NOS (based on the juxtaposition by Neumann and Kremer [26]), employing the works by McComas and Olson [23]; Osborne et al. [20]; Lederman [19], p. 304; and Schwartz et al. [21], p. 4ff.

Figure 3

Adequateness of beliefs. Higher scores indicate more appropriate beliefs in the respective areas. The horizontal bars indicate the scales’ median. The black dot indicates the scales’ mean as in Table 5.

Figure 4

Perceived importance of learning about the NOS aspects as reported by the professors. The diagram shows the average of the two content items per area on a scale from $1=$ not important at all to $4=$ very important. The horizontal bar indicates the median. The black dot indicates the arithmetic mean as in Table 8.

Figure 5

Reported ways of addressing the given NOS aspects in class. For each aspect the combined percentage for both given content items per NOS aspect is given. Black $=$ not addressed at all; blue $=$ addressed implicitly; red $=$ addressed explicitly; green square $=$ is core learning objective.