Chinese Secondary School Science Teachers’ Understanding of the Nature of Science—Emerging from Their Views of Nature

The findings reported in this paper report on an investigation of Chinese people’s understanding of the nature of science in relation to their conceptualisations of Nature. As an exploratory and interpretive study, it uses semi-structured interviews with 25 Chinese secondary school science teachers. The paper first presents these teachers’ conceptualisations of Nature, which were mainly scientifically informed and showed a mixed influence of both traditional and modern Chinese ideas about Nature. Teachers’ functional understandings of the nature of science were then inferred from their conceptualisations of Nature and presented from three perspectives: that of science; the strategies and approaches to doing science; and, the status of scientific knowledge.