New Perspectives in Science Education

The construction of disciplinary knowledge, along with updated scientific conceptions, aligns with the modern objectives of education, which prioritize fostering critical thinking in all students, regardless of their future scientific paths. Reflecting on science is urgent, and identifying and promoting nuanced conceptions is essential in teaching. However, a technicist model persists in teacher training (Montenegro, 2013), focused on decontextualized content. This has led students to develop naive or distorted views of science (Fernández et al., 2002), affecting their understanding of natural phenomena. Over the last two decades, model-based teaching has been proposed as an alternative to traditional approaches (Ariza, Lorenzano & Adúriz-Bravo, 2016). This approach is based on the idea that scientific models can be transferred to the educational domain to form what is called “school science” (Izquierdo-Aymerich et al., 1999). In Chile, research on modeling in teacher training has made significant progress, aligning with international evidence that scientific competencies are intrinsically linked to modeling. This presentation shows results from a research project that evaluated the relationship between modeling processes in school and the construction of conceptions of science among high school students. The study included 320 students from Talca, Concepción, Valparaíso, and Santiago, Chile. The Q-NoS (Q-Nature of Science) instrument was designed and validated, and a mixed-method approach with a quasi-experimental design was used. Additionally, the study involved the design and validation of a teaching sequence oriented towards modeling, which included explicit spaces for metacognitive reflection, empirical characterization of specific phenomena (Ariza, Lorenzano & Adúriz-Bravo, 2020), and expanded applications of school scientific models (Ariza, 2024).