Elementary teachers are navigating a curriculum landscape in which engineering activities now exist alongside science. Teacher education should prepare future elementary teachers to be critical curators of curriculum resources, which includes appraising the extent to which engineering and science activities authentically reflect those fields. To…

The goal of all reform documents in science education is to target scientific literacy. Toward that end, having students understand the nature of science (NOS) is a critical component. As it turns out, the development of NOS conceptions is a cognitive learning outcome. Therefore, an explicit approach needs to be promoted and emphasized in the…

The purpose of this study is to examine how students may hold coexisting and competing conceptual ideas and how students' uses of such ideas may evolve during the process of conceptual change by combining two complementary methods including model analysis and the conceptual framework model of knowledge integration. Conceptual change is fundamental…

The article describes the analysis of the Italian physics curriculum documents in terms of the coverage of nature of science (NOS). NOS is not explicitly presented as part of the Italian high-school physics curriculum. The article focuses on analysing the implicit aspects of the curriculum documents. The Family Resemblance Approach (FRA) to NOS…

A large number of articles in the field of science education reflect on scientific literacy as the main goal of science education (SE), although often with varying viewpoints. Nevertheless, researchers have begun to highlight subject-specific teaching practices that are expected to specifically enhance science subject teaching, including biology.…

I have created a general workflow that describes how students reason through non-trivial organic predict-the-product problems. This was accomplished through an iterative process that combined the experiences of instructors with holistic impressions of think-aloud interviews, incorporating feedback from both undergraduate focus groups and graduate…

There is an increasingly rich body of developmental research on children's understanding of science and religion as ways of knowing. In this manuscript, I put this scholarship in conversation with applied research on science education and consider the potential implications for exposing children to instruction that addresses the relationship…

This study aims to reveal the trends and foundations in research on students' conceptual understanding in science education. The literature was selected from three recognized journals in science education. The Structural Topic Model (STM) method was used to categorize articles into ten topics considering information about the semantic cohesion and…

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…

Tacit knowledge, that is knowledge not expressible in words, may play a role in learning science, yet it is difficult to study directly. Intuition and insight, two processes that link the tacit and the explicit, are proposed as a route to investigating tacit knowledge. Intuitions are defined as tacit hunches or feelings that influence thought with…

Even 150 years after Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species," public school teachers still find themselves dealing with student resistance to learning about biological evolution. Some teachers deal with this pressure by undermining, deemphasizing, or even omitting the topic in their science curriculum. Others face the…

Recently, the nature of science (NOS) has become recognized as an important element within the K-12 science curriculum. Despite differences in the ultimate lists of recommended aspects, a consensus is emerging on what specific NOS elements should be the focus of science instruction and inform textbook writers and curriculum developers. In this…

In this article, we study third-year university students' reasoning about three controversial socio-scientific issues from the viewpoint of education for sustainable development: local issues (the reintroduction of bears in the Pyrenees in France, wolves in the Mercantour) and a global one (global warming). We used the theoretical frameworks of…

Examines letters written by more than 700 participants in a citizen-science project conducted by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. Finds that nearly eighty percent of the letters, which were unsolicited and not connected with a formal evaluation, revealed that participants had engaged in thinking processes similar to those that are part of…

A "Xenograde system" is an imaginary science system. As an imaginary science, it contains a set of concepts and principles which mimic many of the concepts and principles found in physics and other physical sciences. Xenograde is a highly complex closed system which simulates the movement of satellites orbiting a nucleus and some small particles…