Particular among those results was that preservice teachers in the
previous cohort who claimed to have taught the nature of science failed to use the explicit,
activity-based approaches promoted by the MAT program. Specifically, their instructional
approaches were restricted to hands-on activities lacking explicit connections to the nature of
science and failed to include instructional objectives and assessments related to the nature of
science. All the participants in the previous study clearly believed that students would learn the
nature of science implicitly by engaging in science-related activities or, put simply, by ``doing
science.''