Conceptualization and taxonomy to structure the knowledge about science

Abstract

Science education researchers agree that meta-knowledge about science or nature of science (NoS) is a constitutive and relevant component of scientific literacy for all. This basic agreement contrasts with the important controversy about the most appropriate contents to represent NoS in the school curriculum, between the "consensus vision" (so called in the literature), and its critics, who consider it an impoverishing reductionism, and propose broader conceptualizations. Starting from the three-world philosophical model about science, this study elaborates a conceptualization that allows to generate and justify the epistemic and non-epistemic interdisciplinary meta-knowledge about science from the conceptual model, assuming the consensus vision and its criticisms. From this framework, a flexible and open taxonomy is proposed, whose justification arises from its functionality to encompass the emergent categories of the conceptual model, as well as the previous proposals from different authors. The taxonomy is organized through four basic aspects, each displaying multiple specific themes and sub-themes, articulated in a flexible and open way to admit new extensions and to facilitate the non-specialists, especially science teachers, easy understanding of the curriculum meta-cognitive contents.