COMPARISON ON VIEWS OF NATURE OF SCIENCE BETWEEN MATH AND PHYSICS STUDENTS

University lecturers stress the importance of science and non-science students developing informed views of nature of science. However, few previous researches have conducted to explore students' NOS views within specific majors. Consequently, this research used the questionnaire of VNOS-D (View of Nature of Science, the version D) to assess the views of nature of science between math and physics students. From the survey of 311 students, it was found that both math and physics students scored relatively lower on the subjective and social & cultural dimension than others. However, on the tentativeness dimension, the third year and the fourth year physics students showed significantly more sophisticated views than math counterparts. In addition, the differences across grade levels were found on the observation & inference dimension in both math and physics major groups. Some possible explanations were provided. The findings indicated that majors and grade levels influenced the views on some special dimensions of NOS.