Science Education COMMENTS AND CRITICISM A Series of Misrepresentations: A Response to Allchin’s Whole Approach to Assessing Nature of Science Understandings RENE ´ E S. SCHWARTZ, 1 NORMAN G. LEDERMAN, 2 FOUAD ABD-EL-KHALICK 3 1 Department of Biological Sciences, Mallinson Institute for Science Education, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI 49008, USA; 2 Department of Mathematics and Science Education, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL 60616, USA; 3 Department of Curriculum & Instruction, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820, USA Received 12 December 2011; accepted 20 January 2012 DOI 10.1002/sce.21013 Published online 12 June 2012 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). INTRODUCTION In the May 2011 issue of Science Education, Douglas Allchin offered his perspective on what constitutes nature of science (NOS) and suggested a method for assessing NOS (Allchin, 2011). While we agree that NOS is important for scientific literacy and that NOS assessments play a critical role in measuring student scientific literacy, we disagree with Allchin’s conceptualization of NOS, his proposal for a “whole science” perspective, his critique of the Views of Nature of Science (VNOS) questionnaire, and Allchin’s proposed instrument. We offer our comments and criticisms of Allchin’s arguments, as we feel they misrepresent a large body of work and lack evidentiary support, validity, and practical application. MISREPRESENTING NOS AS A SET OF SKILLS First, and fundamental to our concerns, Allchin describes NOS as a skill, as opposed to knowledge (and under “knowledge” we include internalized conceptual understandings as Correspondence to: Rene´ e S. Schwartz; e-mail: r.schwartz@wmich.edu C  2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.