Categories: Alternative conceptions
Examples of how learners understood the status of theories:
"a theory is … a guess, but it's a very scientific guess…
once you've got a theory, you have to work on it until it can be proved…
they did a number of experiments and it was proved that ['big bang' theory] was the only way the universe could've started"
'Andrea', 13-14 year old reported in Taber, K. S., Billingsley, B., Riga, F., & Newdick, H. (2015). English secondary students' thinking about the status of scientific theories: consistent, comprehensive, coherent and extensively evidenced explanations of aspects of the natural world – or just 'an idea someone has'. The Curriculum Journal, 1-34. doi: 10.1080/09585176.2015.1043926
'[a theory is] just a method that hasn't yet been proved, it's just like an idea someone has…it can't really be like a fact or anything [as] it hasn't been proved…Isaac Newton's laws … probably did originate as a theory, but I think he obviously was able to test them"
'Alisha', 13-14 year old reported in Taber, K. S., Billingsley, B., Riga, F., & Newdick, H. (2015). English secondary students' thinking about the status of scientific theories: consistent, comprehensive, coherent and extensively evidenced explanations of aspects of the natural world – or just 'an idea someone has'. The Curriculum Journal, 1-34. doi: 10.1080/09585176.2015.1043926
Read about learners ideas of scientific theories
