The purpose of this article is to examine the philosophical convictions which underline the behaviour of some teachers of physics when dealing with the teaching of physics in a laboratory context. Interviews were conducted with teachers of "Instrumentation for Physics Teaching", usually presented in physics courses syllabus, as well as with some secondary teachers of physics who had previously followed such a course. The questions were addressed in such a manner that the subjects could involved in a conversation about how to teach some contents of physics and to which degree it would be important to appeal to experimentation. The findings of this research revealed some different perspectives about the theme among the subjects, mainly naive inductivist and realistic contentions, which are commented in this article.
The nature of science; naive inductivism; naive realism; physics teachers' beliefs