In response to the discussed state of affairs and with the aim of eliciting, clarifying, and probing learners’ NOS views in depth, researchers (e.g., Driver, Leach, Millar, & Scott, 1996)started to use alternative approaches to assessing students’ NOS views, such as open-ended questions and interviews. Lederman and O’Malley (1990), developed a seven-item open-ended questionnaire, which they intended to use in conjunction with follow-up individual interviews to assess high school students’ views of the tentative NOS. An open-ended questionnaire was used to avoid the problems inherent in the use of standardized forced-choice instruments. In contrast
to forced-choice items used in these latter instruments, open-ended items allow respondents to elucidate their own views regarding the target NOS aspects (Driver et al., 1996). Moreover, given the concern with the meanings that participants ascribed to the target NOS aspects, and the researchers’ interest in elucidating and clarifying participants’ views, it was imperative to avoid misinterpreting their responses to the open-ended items. As such, individual semistructured interviews were used to validate the researchers’ interpretations of participants’ responses as
well as establish the face validity of the questionnaire items. The interviews also aimed to
VIEWS OF NATURE OF SCIENCE QUESTIONNAIRE 503
generate in-depth profiles of participants’ NOS views. During these interviews, participants were
provided their questionnaires (pre – and post – academic year) and asked to read, explain, and
justify their responses. By asking respondents to elaborate on and /or justify their answers, the
researchers were able to assess not only respondents’ positions on certain issues related to NOS,
but the respondents’ reasons for adopting those positions as well.
Lederman and O’Malley (1990) found that inferences drawn regarding participants’ NOS
views from 3 of the 7 open-ended items were not validated during the interviews. Participants
either were unable to interpret the intended meaning of these three items or found them to be
vague. For example, one item asked participants whether scientists use imagination and crea-tivity when performing scientific experiments and investigations. This item was intended to
assess whether students believed scientists use any creativity or imagination in the inter-pretation of data, or whether they believed the process to be totally objective. The data indicated
that students simply considered the planning of the investigation. That is, students typically
believed that scientists needed to be creative to design investigations. In short, students’
responses clearly showed that the item did not assess the intended students’ beliefs. These
results, and others, corroborated the earlier arguments regarding the inadequacies associated
with using standardized paper and pencil instruments as the sole means to assess learners’
NOS views.
In this first attempt, Lederman and O’Malley (1990) reported inferences based on parti-cipants’ responses to four items, whose validity was substantiated during individual interviews.
However, even with those items, the problem of researchers misinterpreting students’ responses
could not have been avoided without interviews. For example, in response to an item that asked
participants to distinguish between scientific theories and laws, students consistently used the
wordprove. This led the researchers to conclude that students held absolutist views of scientific
knowledge. However, during the interviews, it became clear that students did not use ‘‘prove’’ in
an absolute sense, but rather in a sense consistent with the way scientists use it. Thus, although
the item was valid in its assessment of targeted student views, interpretation of student meaning
(without interviews) led to an erroneous conclusion by the researchers. These results provided
further support for the importance of using follow-up interviews whenever paper and pencil NOS
assessments are used. The open-ended questionnaire used by Lederman and O’Malley
represented an initial attempt to assess students’ NOS perceptions validly and was systematically
changed based on student responses in an attempt to improve validity. This first questionnaire is
considered the first form of the VNOS instrument (VNOS-A).