German university students’ views of nature of science in the introductory phase

Learning about the nature of science is an important aspect of becoming part of the culture of practicing physicists. While these topics have a long-standing tradition in U.S. curricula they are currently not part of German educational standards or curricula. And while there is some research concerning primary and secondary school students’ beliefs in this area, there are hardly any data about German university students. In this study we query 100 physics students in their first to fifth semester at a German university for their views of nature of science. We then compare them to a sample of physics professors at German universities from an earlier study. The students exhibit quite adequate views in some areas but could improve on their knowledge of the variability of scientific methods and the tentativeness and limited certainty of scientific knowledge—two issues they have in common with the professors. If we interpret the sample longitudinally, we see positive development in the first but worsening in the latter area.

Figure 1

Adequateness of students’ beliefs. Higher scores indicate more appropriate beliefs in the respective areas. Horizontal bars indicate scale medians, black dots indicate arithmetic means, red dots represent outliers. Raw numbers can be found in Table 4.

Figure 2

Adequateness of students’ beliefs by cohorts (A, B, C from left to right). Higher scores indicate more appropriate beliefs in the respective areas. Horizontal bars indicate scale medians, black dots indicate arithmetic means, red dots represent outliers.

Figure 3

Adequateness of students’ (left) and professors’ (right) beliefs. Higher scores indicate more appropriate beliefs in the respective areas. Horizontal bars indicate scale medians, black dots indicate arithmetic means, red dots represent outliers. Significant differences between groups in U-test are marked.