Understandings of Graduate Students on Nature of Science

Knowing about nature of science (NOS) and its products is a basic requirement of all graduate students and researchers due to being both members of society and experts on different scientific disciplines. As the first step, determining NOS understandings of graduate students has importance to go further in developing current situation. Therefore, this study aimed to determine NOS understandings of graduate students from different disciplines. The study included seven graduate students who were enrolled in universities as researchers. As the data collection way, face-to-face interview was utilized. The data of the study was analyzed by assigning the participants to four categories; expert, naive, mixed and not applicable. The results showed that majority of the participants were expert on social and cultural embeddedness of science and role of creativity and imagination in science while majority of the participants were naive on the aspects of “hierarchy between theories and laws”. Majority of them had mixed understandings on the aspects of existence of only one method in science, subjectivity, tentativeness. Interestingly, all of the participants were naive in terms of definition of science. The results and implications of the study will be discussed