The views of nature of science (VNOS) expressed by junior high school students from East Java, Indonesia

The goal of science education around the world is achieving a scientific literate society and one of important components in developing scientific literacy is understanding the nature of science (NOS). This study aims to describe a profile of junior high school students’ views of NOS. The research was descriptive in nature using survey for data collection. The subjects were 840 junior high school students selected from nine districts in East Java province, Indonesia. The instrument of NOS developed was a questionnaire consisted of 24 items with a Likert scale (alpha Cronbach = 0.802). The six aspects of NOS addressed in the instrument were observation and inference, tentativeness, scientific theory & laws, social & cultural embeddedness, imagination & creativity, and scientific methods. The results of the study showed that in general the junior high school students’ views of all NOS aspects were lacking. In detail, from the six aspects of NOS: the percentage of students who held Well Informed Views, Informed Views, Less Informed Views, Uninformed Views and Uncodeable/Doubt of NOS were 8%, 17%, 10%, 2%, and 63%, respectively. Students understood well in the aspect of tentativeness while they understood least in the aspect of scientific theory and laws. Majority of students, however, doubted in understanding of NOS. The study has implication that knowledge about the NOS should be taught in junior high school explicitly. Moreover, the textbooks they used should also include NOS explicitly so that students will have well informed views of NOS.