Erduran and Dagher's (2014) account of the Family Resemblance Approach (FRA) to Nature of Science (NOS) is a relatively new framework that frames NOS in a holistic fashion, inclusive of cognitive-epistemic and social-institutional aspects. This approach has also been referred to as the "Reconceptualized Family Resemblance Approach to Nature…

While the importance of explicit and reflective NOS instruction is clear in the literature, questions remain about how to enact such instruction. That is, literature is sometimes unclear in defining how to enact explicit and reflective NOS instruction. While some authors recommend using questions (e.g., Clough 2007) to enact effective NOS…

Through local scientific learning, this action research attempts to improve primary school students' understanding of the nature of science. The target group consisted of nine grade 6 students from a school in Thailand's northeast. The observational tools were the understanding of nature of science test, understanding of nature of science…

In this study, we report the results of the content analysis of preservice middle school science teachers' own written science storybooks and middle school female students' reflections of five of the books. The participants of this study were 50 preservice middle school science teachers taking a history and nature of science course and 13…

Reconceptualized Family Resemblance Approach to Nature of Science (RFN) explains science as a cognitive, epistemic, and social institutional system. The aim of this study is to examine the inclusion of Nature of Science (NOS) in the 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grade Turkish middle school science textbooks. The "content," "activity,"…

Promoting a functional scientific literacy entails preparing people to effectively engage and make decisions regarding real-world socioscientfic issues (SSI) through consideration of the relevant products and processes of science, as well as social, cultural, environmental, and ethical factors. Students can develop a functional scientific literacy…

An important goal of science education is for students to understand the nature of science. Science education has raised the question of what science is, how scientific knowledge is developed and how people participate in this process under the conceptual umbrella of 'nature of science' (NOS). This study aims to look at the effectiveness of the…

The study seeks to explore the extent to which students think pedagogical activities exemplifying various degrees of contextualization accurately reflect the work of scientists. Arguing for scaffolding across multiple degrees of contextualization, Clough (2006) reasoned that different contextualization plays different, but complimentary, roles in…

The aim of this study is to examine how the nature of science dimensions are represented in the secondary school 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grade science textbooks of the last twenty years. It is also within the scope of the research to investigate how these dimensions in the textbooks changed during the twenty years. The document analysis method was…

Nowadays, the assessment of student performance has become increasingly technology-based, a trend that can also be observed in the evaluation of scientific reasoning, with more and more of the formerly paper-based assessment tools moving into the digital space. The study aimed to examine the reliability and validity of the paper-based and…

Epistemological beliefs, including the source of knowledge, the certainty of knowledge, the organization of knowledge, the control of learning, and the speed of learning, are important to identify since these beliefs impact students' learning processes and how they attribute meaning to life. Concept cartoons, that students find genuine and…

In this article, a series of activities on explicit teaching of specific aspects of the 'nature of science' are presented. The authors explore teaching the nature of science through inquiry-based activities on electric circuits. The activities concern classification of objects as conductors or insulators and took place in three classes of 4th…

What better way to engage fifth-grade students in science and engineering practices than to use paper airplanes to encourage them to question, explore, create, and test designs! This multi-day unit draws from a fourth-grade curriculum (Pearson 2012) aligned with the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS Lead States 2013) used in…

Mind maps that contain visual and verbal elements can be thought of as an effective graphical tool that can be used to reveal the existing knowledge, opinions and perceptions of individuals about a concept through mental association. In this study, the aim was to determine the mental models of middle school students related to science by using…

A "Framework for K-12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards" ("NGSS") are intended for all students, hence "all standards, all students" (NGSS Lead States 2013). To make this vision a reality, the "NGSS" highlight three key instructional shifts: (1) explain phenomena or design solutions…