position, that is, highlighting agreements among philosophers, historians, and soci- ologists while downplaying, or remaining silent on, continuing controversies. The latter approach is more positive in its content and implications. Indeed, this approach underlies the very development of statements on NOS adopted by reform documents in science education. This approach is most evident in documents, such as Science for All Americans (AAAS 1990 ) , where, for example, the aforemen- tioned debates between realists and empiricists were completely disregarded. In other instances, contentious issues were addressed by adopting compromise posi- tions, such as affirming that scientific knowledge is tentative but durable (AAAS 1990 , pp. 2–3), which seemingly is an attempt to veer away from realist perspec- tives on the status of scientific knowledge while simultaneously acknowledging that successes in science cannot simply be explained by social constructivist con- ceptions of NOS (Brown 1998 ) .