Examining the epistemological and ontological underpinnings in science education: An introduction

Abstract

The call for manuscripts that initiated this theme issue (Kyle, 1994) was as follows: What are the epistemological and ontological underpinnings associated with science education? How do the commitments associated with such underpinnings influence research into science teach- ing and learning? Manuscripts ought to explore historical, philosophical, sociological, and/or theoretical frames of reference for doing research in science education. Author may wish to con- sider what constitutes knowledge and being within a particular frame and then delineate viable research questions, methodologies, and methods as they discuss their research. When this call first went out in 1994, we (Abell and Eichinger) each formulated in our minds the kinds of manuscripts that we expected would be submitted. We assumed that we would hear about studies that came from various research traditions or were based on particu- lar methodologies (e.g., feminism, ethnomethodology, neo-Marxism). Such methodologies de- rive from beliefs or assumptions that define the nature of the limits of the inquiry. According to Guba and Lincoln (1994), these beliefs can be summarized by a researcher’s responses to the following questions: What is the nature of reality? (the ontological question); What is the na- ture of knower and known? (the epistemological question); and, How can the researcher go about finding out? (the methodological question). In science education, when we hear terms like ontology and epistemology, we are natural- ly drawn to thinking about the nature of science. Since we both also teach a course on the na- ture of science in science teaching (Eichinger, Abell, & Dagher, 1997) we also predicted that some of the submissions to this theme issue would be the sorts of papers we typically see pre- sented at the International History, Philosophy and Science Teaching conferences (e.g., Finley, Alchin, Rhees, & Fifield, 1995). So