Blending nature of science with science content learning

The current literature seems to widely agree that it is important to include nature of science (NOS) in science education as a component that receives explicit attention. This chapter focuses on a specific approach to explicitly teach NOS in a contextualized manner that infuses NOS ideas with disciplinary content knowledge, that is, with knowledge about scientific concepts. Toward this end, we introduce, from a general point of view, three particular ways to blending NOS and science content. We then illustrate these approaches in the context of the concept of energy, which is a core, unifying concept of science that cuts across the different scientific disciplines. Finally, we discuss four specific activities, which are designed to facilitate the integration of general NOS concepts, disciplinary aspects of energy, and energy-specific aspects of NOS. For each of these activities, we discuss how explicit connections between NOS and science content can and should be drawn during science instruction in order to facilitate students’ learning.