The Nature of Scientific Meta-Knowledge

We argue that science education should focus on enabling students to develop meta-knowledge about science so that students come to understand how different aspects of the scientific enterprise work together to create and test scientific theories. Furthermore, we advocate that teaching such meta-knowledge should begin in early elementary school and continue through college and graduate school and that it should be taught for all types of science, including the biological, physical, and social sciences. In this chapter we outline a theory of scientific meta-knowledge, which is built around four critical aspects of science. We refer to the four types of meta-knowledge that are needed as (1) meta-theoretic knowledge, (2) meta-questioning knowledge, (3) meta-investigation knowledge, and (4) meta-analytic knowledge. While numerous investigators, working in the philosophy of science, cognitive science, and science education, have developed theories about various aspects of the nature of science, there have been few attempts to provide detailed models that explicate all four of these components, along with an elaboration of how they work together in scientific inquiry. This has resulted in science curricula that provide students and teachers with impoverished views of the nature of science. Most K-12 inquiry-oriented science curricula, for example, underemphasize the role of theory, particularly competing theories. They also fail to adequately explain the relationship between theory and evidence, nor do they adequately portray the inquiry processes that are involved in the interplay between the two. Even collegelevel textbooks on research methods fall short. Most focus on investigation and analysis and do not adequately discuss the different forms that scientific models and theories can take or the types of evidence and arguments that can be used to support or refute them.