This article reports a study to elicit junior secondary students' understandings of the nature of science (NOS) through a peer collaboration instruction based on science stories specially developed to present several aspects of NOS. The study also investigated how students reacted to the stories and whether they were able to extract the aspects of NOS presented in the stories. The results show that many students held a serendipitous empiricist view of experimentation and took scientific theories as absolute truth representing reality. Although the science stories impacted on students in substantial ways and the peer collaboration setting helped them develop shared understandings, many students changed from one set of inadequate views of NOS to another rather than to adequate views. This was attributed to students interpreting the stories in idiosyncratic ways other than those intended by the instruction and focusing their attention selectively on certain aspects of the stories that appeared to confirm and reinforce their inadequate views. The implications of the findings are discussed.
[Copyright of International Journal of Science Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500690210126748]