Talking science is based on the premise of being serious and dignified. Still, both teachers and students use humour when they communicate. However, little is known about the mechanisms of how learning science is constituted when teachers and students are using spontaneous humour in science classroom activities. In this study, we acknowledge this…

This study considers the concept of observer--the fundamental concept axial for fundamental physical theories. The history of the observer concept in physics is reviewed and summarized. In the following, the observer concept is considered with regard to science education where scientific concepts should reflect their status in science. This…

Observation is widely regarded as a fundamental way of studying nature. However, due to its complexity, proposing a comprehensive characterization is challenging. Observation is a method of studying nature that can be divided into several dimensions. Each of these dimensions can be presented as a pair of terms, which are elaborated in this paper…

In the Next Generation Science Standards, energy is considered a "crosscutting concept" that bridges disciplinary boundaries and unites scientific disciplines. I examine how energy is represented in physics, biology, and chemistry contexts, using the reaction of molecular oxygen with sugar as an exemplar, and argue that disciplines…

This study focused on the use of anticipation guides (AG) as a reading strategy to support science reading and explored the level of students' scientific written arguments as a result. An AG consists of four components that address the topic of the reading activity: statements about the content, what I think, what the texts say, and evidence in…

This study used structural topic models (STMs) to analyze physics pre-service teachers' conceptual understanding of scientific literacy. Participants included 126 physics pre-service teachers studying at Shandong Normal University in China. First, we used an open-ended questionnaire to collect the data. Second, STM was used to classify the data,…

Creating and critiquing explanations of phenomena is a significant goal of many scientific disciplines and therefore also a learning goal of science education. A significant source of explanations is science textbooks; however, the large corpus of text in textbooks means that manual review of explanations by individual researchers is extremely…

Scientific teleological explanations cite end states as causes to account for physical phenomena. Researchers in science education have noted that students can use teleological explanations in ways that are illegitimate, for example, by implying that inanimate objects are acting intentionally. Despite such cases, several examples of legitimate…

Over four decades of conceptual change studies in education have been based on the assumption that learners come to science classrooms with functionally fixated intuitive ideas. However, it is largely ignored that such pre-instructional conceptions are probabilistic, reflecting some aspects of an idiosyncratic sampling of their experiences and…

Physical education in colleges plays an increasingly important role in cultivating high-quality innovative talent. The main factors that affect college students' approaches to learning physics remain unknown. This study examined the relationships among college engineering students' epistemic views of physics, conceptions of learning physics, and…

To be able to form and develop competencies with regard to the nature of science (NOS) for students, the teachers must have appropriate conceptions about NOS. Therefore, this study explored levels of conceptions about the nature of science of future physics teachers who have experienced two different physics teachers-education curricula using the…

This study explored over 200 journals and a content-focussed research repository to investigate the occurrence of research on the Big Questions in the field of astronomy education research (AER), focussing on Cosmology and Religion. Using both qualitative and quantitative techniques, 151 articles were selected and analysed. Our results reveal that…

For the past five decades, the majority of science education has adhered to a pedagogical philosophy which contends that issues in the acquisition and expression of target scientific narratives by learners stem from the existence of "incorrect beliefs" called misconceptions. According to this philosophy, misconceptions must be…

Modelling roles of mathematics in physics has proved to be a difficult task, with previous models of the interplay between the two disciplines mainly focusing on mathematical modelling and problem solving. However, to convey a realistic view of physics as a field of science to our students, we need to do more than train them to become fluent in…

Among the relevant aspects of the family resemblance approach (FRA), our study focuses on the potential of the approach to elaborate on disciplinary identities in an interdisciplinary context, specifically regarding the interplay between physics and mathematics. We present and discuss how the FRA wheel can be used and intertwined with the…