Elementary school teachers’ views on the nature of science as a foundation in science learning

This research was conducted to investigate the elementary school teachers’ opinions on the nature of science. The research is a descriptive quantitative. The instrument was a questionnaire consisting of 28 statements that had been tested for the validity. The respondents were four teachers from two elementary schools in the Banda Aceh area. The results show that, in general, 30% of the teachers strongly agree about the nature of the science concept, another 49% agree, 14% disagree, and only 8% strongly disagree. The results showed that most of the teachers have a good opinion of the Nature of Science (NOS) as a foundation in gaining knowledge. Most of the teachers have a positive view on the aspects of subjectivity, creativity, tentativeness, social and cultural closeness, scientific law and theory, empirical evidence, observation and inference, scientific ethos, cooperation and collaboration. Teachers do not have a good understanding of the universal scientific method because some teachers believe that scientists should always use the same scientific method. Therefore, teachers need to understand the nature of science as a basis for thinking and practice in obtaining appropriate knowledge in the learning process.