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Laboratory work in physics has traditionally focused on the verification of facts, theories and laws. In contrast, this article describes how laboratory tasks can be used to promote students understanding about the nature of science and scientific inquiry. In the project reported here, students learn about measurement uncertainties and a simplified graphical method for propagating errors. By using this knowledge to compare the precision of two common methods to determine the spring constant, Hooke's Law and simple harmonic motion, students learn about the nature of experimentation in physics. From this specific example, comparisons can then be made with authentic research to highlight more general aspects of the nature of science and scientific inquiry.

The objective of this thesis is to describe and analyse customs of science teaching in secondary schools and teacher education programmes in Sweden in relation to the notion of “inquiry” in science education. The main focus is on customs of language use and the educational goal of learning about scientific inquiry as distinct from the related goals of learning to do inquiry and learning canonical science content. There is also an exploration and description of different teaching approaches associated with “inquiry”. Previous research has noted that a key issue for reaching the goal of learning about scientific inquiry is the extent to which teachers are able to guide students to explicitly reflect upon this topic. A prerequisite is that teachers give students access to relevant categories of language for explicit reflection on the characteristics of scientific inquiry. Because of the situated nature of language use and learning, this also raises the need to address topics of context, culture and customs in science education. This thesis addresses the questions of how existing customs of teaching science are related to the goal of learning about scientific inquiry, how inquiry-related terminology is used in this context, and how relevant distinctions can be made to aid explicit reflection on these issues. Data has been collected in two studies and analysed and presented in four papers. Study 1 is based on interviews with twelve secondary school science teachers, and Study 2 is based on focus group interviews with 32 pre-service teacher students. The results include a description of the existing customs of inquiry-oriented instructional approaches in Swedish secondary schools. They show that these are often not connected with an explicit focus on teaching about the characteristics of scientific inquiry. Inquiry-related terminology is analysed with a focus on the role and use of the terms “hypothesis” and “experiment”. Based on a theoretical framework of sociocultural and pragmatist views on language and learning, it is shown how the use of these terms, both in secondary schools and teacher education, tend to conflate the two categories methods of teaching and methods of scientific inquiry. Some problematic consequences for reaching the goal of learning about scientific inquiry are discussed, as well as possible origins of the problems and how the results from this thesis can be useful in overcoming these. At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 3: Submitted. Paper 4: Submitted.