The family resemblance approach to nature of science is receiving increasing attention by science educators since its inception about a decade ago. Many scholars of science education have contributed and continue to contribute to it not only theoretically but also by applying it empirically to a wide range of areas such as curriculum and textbook…

In this article, we discuss the replication of a forgotten chemical instrument in the context of undergraduate chemistry education. Together with students, we have attempted to replicate an eighteenth century "eudiometrical" procedure. Eudiometry was the practice of measuring the "goodness" of the air by looking at the volume…

There has been growing criticism over the aims, methods, and contents of practical work in school science, particularly concerning their tendency to oversimplify the scientific practice with focus on the hypothesis-testing function of experiments. In this article, we offer a reading of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's scientific writings--particularly…

Carl Erich Correns (1864-1933) is remembered in the annals of science as one of the three botanists who re-discovered Mendel's laws. He can also, however, be regarded as one of the founding figures of classical genetics in Germany. Between 1894 and 1899 he carried out the crossing experiments with corn and peas that led to the re-statement of…

There has been much research on principles and fundamental concepts of mechanics. Problems concerning the law of inertia, the concepts of force, fictitious force, weight, mass and the distinction between inertial and gravitational mass are addressed in the first part of the present paper. It is argued in the second that the law of inertia is the…

Assuming that textbooks give literary expression to cultural and ideological values of a nation or group, we propose the analysis of chemistry textbooks used in Brazilian universities throughout the twentieth century. We analyzed iconographic and textual aspects of 31 textbooks which had significant diffusion in the context of Brazilian…

Books I and III of Newton's "Principia" develop Newton's dynamical theory and show how it explains a number of celestial phenomena. Book II has received little attention from historians or educators because it does not play a major role in Newton's argument. However, it is in Book II that we see most clearly Newton both as a theoretician and an…

One of those who failed to establish himself as a natural philosopher in 18th century Paris was the future revolutionary Jean Paul Marat. He did not only publish several monographs on heat, optics and electricity in which he attempted to characterise his work as being purely empirical but he also tried to establish himself as a public lecturer.…

Gerald Rutherford (1964), one of the original authors of the Harvard Project Physics course which emphasized the history of science, expressed a view of inquiry which advocated the historical re-constructions of significant experiments. To implement this view we examine two modes of historical re-constructions; Heering's ("Paper…

The purpose of the paper is twofold: (1) To contrast the longstanding tradition of private and public courses of chemistry with the public demonstrations of physics. Whether taught in public institutions such as the Jardin du Roi or by apothecaries in their officines chemistry demonstrations were not for the entertainment of their audiences.…

Piaget's investigations into children's understanding of the laws governing the movement of a simple pendulum were first reported in 1955 as part of a report into how children's knowledge of the physical world changes during development. Chapter 4 of Inhelder & Piaget (1955/1958) entitled "The Oscillation of a Pendulum and the Operations of…

Ignoring the role of chance in science distorts the nature of the scientific process. Teachers can address this issue by means of several in-depth historical case studies, such as the discovery of electromagnetism by Oersted. Oersted was led to his lecture experiment by logic (two new hypotheses), but its success from the first trial was largely…

The simple pendulum is a model for the linear oscillator. The usual mathematical treatment of the problem begins with a differential equation that one solves with the techniques of the differential calculus, a formal process that tends to obscure the physics. In this paper we begin with a kinematic description of the motion obtained by experiment…

Inhelder and Piaget (1958) studied schoolchildren's understanding of a simple pendulum as a means of investigating the development of the control of variables scheme and the "ceteris paribus" principle central to scientific experimentation.The time-consuming nature of the individual interview technique used by Inhelder has led to the development…