Attitudes of Undergraduate General Science Students Toward Learning Science and the Nature of Science

摘要

We investigated general science students' attitudes regarding the acquisition of scientific knowledge and the nature of science by administering a 32-item attitudinal survey. To assemble a representative array of epistemological attitudes at our institution and to determine the impact of instruction, we administered this survey to over 250 students from 19 sections of three general science courses. We characterized the instructional styles for each course using three broad categories: Traditional, Transitional, and Learning-centered. This paper focuses on the impact those different instructional styles had on students' epistemological beliefs.