Designing and evaluating short teaching interventions about the epistemology of science in high school classrooms

This paper reports the design and evaluation of small‐scale teaching interventions addressing the epistemology of science as part of the regular high school science courses followed by English students. Although there is a growing consensus that the curriculum should include aspects of the nature of science, there is a limited body of knowledge about how this might be achieved in an already crowded curriculum. Single lessons were designed in order to raise epistemological questions in subject matter contexts likely to be encountered by students as part of regular teaching. This paper presents findings from an evaluation of the teaching, addressing both the impact of the resources and associated teaching strategies on student learning, and teachers' reactions to the interventions. The teaching interventions were successful in their aim of “opening up” epistemological issues with a majority of students. A significant minority of students did not make any progress in terms of their responses to diagnostic questions, even though they appeared able to participate in the lesson's activities. The paper concludes with a discussion of issues surrounding the design and implementation of teaching with an epistemological focus in the context of crowded science curricula.