A Critical Difference Between the Promotion of “Nature of Science” Instruction Outside and Inside Thailand

Abstract

     Since nature of science (NOS) has taken its part in the Basic Education Core Curriculum B.E. 2544 (2001), there have been serious attempts to foster students’ understanding of NOS. This article aims at examining various documents about promoting NOS instruction both outside and inside Thailand. This review leads to a notice about a critical difference between the two contexts. That is, while international research describes that NOS is beliefs and values inherent in scientific knowledge and processes by which scientific knowledge is acquired, Thailand’s National Science Curriculum Standards tends to mean that NOS is scientific processes. This difference causes a number of Thai teachers to misunderstand that NOS is scientific processes and that teaching NOS is teaching the students to have scientific process skills. Thus, to reduce and prevent those misconceptions, the authors propose that revising the content about NOS in Thailand’s National Science Curriculum Standards is necessary.