Incorporating Historical Short Stories in Junior High School Science Lesson

Nature of Science (NOS) is normally not part of science instruction and science assessment in the Philippines. It was not an explicit domain in the science curriculum. The main goal of this study was to find out the impact of historical short stories on the students' NOS view and academic achievement in the Grade 10 students of one of the public junior high schools in South Luzon. To achieve this goal, the researchers utilized a learning management system (LMS) where the students can read and download the stories in their computers or mobile phones. They were also asked to turn in their homework and journals in this LMS. Purposive sampling was used in choosing the participants. The Student Understanding of Science and Scientific Inquiry (SUSSI) and content test were taken by the student-participants during the pretest and post-test to assess NOS views and achievement, respectively. The dependent t-test was used to compare the pretest and post-test science content test scores and percentages to report the NOS views of the participants. As a result, the participants demonstrate changed naïve-transitional NOS views to transitional-informed NOS views. After the implementation, the students were able to give concrete examples in the open-ended responses from the short stories they read and most of the responses were categorized as transitional-informed. On the other hand, the use of NOS-infused lessons was able to address the issue that teaching NOS will take considerable amount of time of actual instruction since NOS-infused lessons were able to change the NOS views and improved the achievement scores (p=0.000 <0.05). Though there was an improvement in the NOS views of the students, there is a need to sustain and to further improve their NOS understanding thus, designing NOS interventions are desired which will not greatly affect the science content instruction.