The relationship between students' understanding of nature of science and their metacognitive awareness

Abstract

The Reconceptualized Family Resemblance Approach to Nature of Science (RFN) have been the holistic account in the nature of science education (Erduran & Dagher, 2014; Kaya & Erduran, 2016). The nature of science (NOS) can be closely related with students' cognitive/metacognitive process and skills which contribute their NOS learning (Peters-Burton & Burton, 2020). The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between middle school students' RFN understanding and their metacognitive awareness with quantitative and qualitative perspectives. Furthermore, examining students' RFN perceptions and metacognitive awareness were also another focus of the study. In total 701 students (180 5th, 167 6th, 170 7th and 184 8th grade) were attended to the study. The data sources were a 37 item "RFN Student Questionnaire" (Cilekrenkli, 2019), RFN interviews, "The Metacognitive Awareness Inventory for Children" (Karakelle & Saraç, 2007) and metacognitive awareness interviews. As a result of the quantitative data analysis, Pearson r correlation showed that there was a significant positive relationship between middle school students' RFN understanding and their metacognitive awareness, and this relationship was evident among each grade level (5th,6th,7th and 8th) students separately. The qualitative data also showed and supported that the students who were metacognitively aware had higher RFN perception and similarly, students with low metacognitive awareness had low RFN perception. Moreover, there were differences between different grade level students' RFN understanding and perception according to the quantitative and qualitative results. Most students were limited in viewing science as epistemic-cognitive–social system holistically and making relationship between categories of science. In metacognitive awareness, while some students were using metacognitive strategies and skills more consciously, low level students were limited in these skills. The study opens up new research focus for experimental and causal comparative studies in terms of inclusion of metacognitive awareness RFN teaching.