This study aims to examine the relationship between pre-service teachers' understanding of the Nature of Science (NOS), epistemic beliefs (EB), and pseudoscientific beliefs (PSB), and whether there is a difference between pre-service teachers' understanding of NOS and pseudoscientific beliefs with sophisticated and naive epistemological beliefs.…

The paper aims to provide a review of literature that emphasizes students' and teachers' views on the nature of science (NOS) and associated instructional approaches to develop adequate understanding of the NOS that have been employed in different contexts. One hundred and seventy-two (172) studies were selected from ResearchGate, Academia, Google…

The demarcation problem as one of the most prominent topics in the philosophy of science deserves a higher profile in science education literature as a part of the discussions about the instruction of the nature of science (NOS) concepts to generate a scientifically literate society. In this qualitative survey research study, the views of the…

The notion of family resemblance has recently emerged as a promising and fruitful approach to characterising the nature of science (NOS) in science education research, offering solutions to some perplexing challenges such as capturing both the domain-general and domain-specific features of science with a single framework. At the same time,…

Nature of science (NOS) is a global conception of the infrastructure of science and, therefore, forms the foundation for teaching and learning science, especially for preservice teachers who are expected to have the proper understanding of NOS to thoughtfully emphasize NOS within their instruction to students. However, studies investigating UAE…

This study discusses how textbook educational approaches concerning Le Châtelier's principle (LCP) may hinder student comprehension and prediction of chemical equilibrium disturbances. Firstly, after summarising students' LCP erroneous assertions/explanations, a categorisation of the potential barriers that may originate student misunderstandings…

Computational thinking is a contemporary science and engineering practice that has been introduced to the US science classrooms due to its emphasis in the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS). However, including computational thinking into science instruction may be challenging. Therefore, for biological evolution (an essential…

The argument that the second law of thermodynamics contradicts the theory of evolution has recently been revived by anti-evolutionists. In its basic form, the argument asserts that whereas evolution implies that there has been an increase in biological complexity over time, the second law, a fundamental principle of physics, shows this to be…

Teaching false theories goes against the general pedagogical and philosophical belief that we must only teach and learn what is true. In general, the goal of pedagogy is taken to be epistemic: to gain knowledge and avoid ignorance. In this article, I argue that for realists and antirealists alike, epistemological and pedagogical goals have to come…

Life sciences became Biology, a formal scientific discipline, at the turn of the nineteenth century, when it adopted the methods of reductive physics and chemistry. Mendel's hypothesis of inheritance of discrete factors further introduced a quantitative reductionist dimension into biology. In 1910 Johannsen differentiated between the…

In learning chemistry at the entry level, many learners labor under misconceptions about the subject matter that are so fundamental that they are typically never addressed. A fundamental misconception in chemistry appears to arise from an adding of existing phenomenal concepts to newly-acquired chemical concepts, so that beginning learners think…

This study explored how eight widely used secondary science textbooks described scientific methodology and to what degree the textbooks' examples and investigations were consistent with this description. Data consisted of all text from student and teacher editions that referred to scientific methodology and all investigations. Analysis used an…

In this study, we investigated distinctions among the diversity of religious traditions represented by Lebanese and Egyptian Muslim high school students regarding their understanding and acceptance of biological evolution and how they relate the science to their religious beliefs. We explored secondary students' conceptions of evolution among…

Pseudoscience is error, substantive or methodological, parading as science. Obvious examples are parapsychology, "intelligent design," and homeopathy. Psychoanalysis and pop evolutionary psychology are less obvious, yet no less flawed in both method and doctrine. The fact that science can be faked to the point of deceiving science lovers suggests…

The aim of developing students' understanding of the nature of science [NOS] has been considered an important aspect of science education. However, the results of previous research indicate that students of various ages and even teachers possess both inaccurate and inappropriate views of the NOS. Such a failure has been explained by the view that…