This article argues that what is most at risk in schooling during a global pandemic, or other similar broad challenges to normal functioning, are those elements that might be considered the less traditional and so the most progressive. After setting out some general background common to the challenge faced by schools and school teachers, this…

This article offers a new interpretation of Piaget's decanting experiments, employing the mathematical notion of equivalence instead of conservation. Some reference is made to Piaget's theories and to his educational legacy, but the focus in on certain of the experiments. The key to the new analysis is the abstraction principle, which…

The question of how to foster rooting in science education points towards a double challenge; efforts to "prevent" (further) uprooting and efforts to "promote" rooting/re-rooting. Wolff-Michael Roth's paper discusses the uprooting/rooting pair of concepts, students' feeling of alienation and loss of fundamental sense of the…

This study used scientometric methods to conduct an automatic content analysis on the development trends of science education research from the published articles in the four journals of "International Journal of Science Education, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Research in Science Education, and Science Education" from 1990 to 2007. The…

Efforts to enact balanced treatment laws represent an attempt to wedge the supernatural into scientific explanations. Current attempts to displace methodological naturalism from science indicate a need to make the nature of science a central theme in our instruction. This article utilizes constructivist listening to introduce students to five…

This article explores the relation between how scientific knowledge is created and the reasoning involved in learning content with understanding. Although an asserted parallel between these underpins reform, little is actually known about this relation. This article offers a model of this relation that draws coherent connections between the…

I report on benefits from 26 teacher-participant evaluators of a computer game designed to motivate learning and to ease conceptual understanding of biology in South Africa. Using a developmental, social constructivist and interpretative model, the recommendation is to include the value systems and needs of end-users (through social dialogue);…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of science education courses on a group of Taiwanese inservice and preservice teachers' views toward the nature of science. There were two science education courses in the study; one was for 36 inservice teachers, while the other one was for 32 preservice teachers. Both of the courses included…

This paper provides an argument in favor of a specific pedagogical method of using the history of science to help students develop more informed views about nature of science (NOS) issues. The paper describes a series of lesson plans devoted to encouraging students to engage, "unbeknownst to them", in similar reasoning that led…

Constructivism, as a set of theories about how learners learn, has been an important discourse in the educational research literature for a number of years. Interestingly, it has been far more visible in science education research than in environmental education research. This article considers conceptual change theory within constructivism as a…