Guide to Professional Development of
Out-of-School Science Activity Leaders

From the National Partnership for After School Science (NPASS)

NPASS

The Nature of Science

The links on this page provide everything needed to present a 60-minute adult-learning session exploring the nature and practices of science.

A goal of many out-of-school science programs is to give youth the opportunity to take part in activities where they think and behave like scientists. These activities are most effective when the activity leader can help make youth aware of the general scientific processes and habits of mind reflected in the activities. The better an activity leader understands the nature and practices of science, the better they can make this explicit for youth.

The fact is that many children and adults, including science activity leaders, hold a combination of accurate and inaccurate ideas about what science is. For this reason, activity leaders are given a chance to grapple with what constitutes science and how to represent this to youth in this session. Science is based on evidence, testability, consistency, non-dogmatic objectivity, as well as peer review. Like many other systems of thought, science is a quest for truth, yet one of its greatest strengths is that it never claims to have arrived at the absolute truth. It helps us to understand the world around us, and in a practical sense, it has great predictive value. Science is a marvelous, fruitful, and yet constantly changing way of looking at the world. Some people think science is infallible. Others see it as arrogant, biased, or heartless. Activity leaders should come to know that none of these views are an accurate representation of science.

During this session, participating activity leaders explore the nature and practices of science to see how science is similar and different from other disciplines. Through discussion of their prior ideas, and by sorting a variety of scientific and non-scientific statements, participants arrive at initial criteria for identifying what science is and what it is not. The workshop presenter then introduces some well-established perspectives on the nature of science. Finally, the activity leaders gain insight into the practices of science by actually doing science and by reflecting on how the nature of science can be represented in a hands-on, inquiry-based activity for youth. This combination of experiences illustrates some of the processes involved in science and helps to communicate the nature of science as an evidence-driven human endeavor to investigate, understand, and make generalizations about the natural world.