While acknowledging that a number of out-of-school factors misrepresent the
nature of science, overwhelming evidence exists that school science is at least equally
culpable. Almost 50 years ago Anderson, (1 950) concluded that teachers were more
concerned with imparting scientific facts than helping students understand the
processes of science-an indication that something was awry regarding teachers’
notions of the nature of science. Miller, (1 963), after conducting one of the earliest
and frequently-cited studies of teachers’ views of the image of science, concluded that
many science teachers and their students failed to demonstrated understanding of
how science works. Several years later, Schmidt, (1967) replicated Miller’s study
and made essentially the same conclusions