For many years, hegemonic approaches to teaching the nature of science (NOS) have focused mainly on understanding some epistemic (i.e., rational, or cognitive) aspects involved in the construction of science. So, aspects of a non-epistemic (i.e., non-rational, contextual, or extra-scientific) nature have been practically neglected in these…

In this article, a guide is presented to help biology teachers so that they can process the subject of the eye and eye defects with an interdisciplinary approach. The guide, which was created by considering the stages of a lesson plan, includes content information, suggestions, and various directions that can help the teacher at every stage. The…

Numerous studies have shown that teaching the history and philosophy of science (POS) can help improve senior high school students' scientific literacy. The history of science is usually taught in school science lessons by reference to particular cases, experiments, and scientists. In contrast, the POS -- that is, the study of general and…

While much is known about teacher learning of nature of science (NOS) concepts, less is known about how teachers develop an understanding of how to effectively teach NOS or how instructional views might differ across levels of the Family Resemblance Approach (FRA) wheel. Therefore, this study investigated the NOS instructional views related to…

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,…

LASAR (Learning about Science and Religion) has been exploring different opportunities to engage children with practical science enquiry to develop children's understanding of the nature of science and how they suppose science connects to 'big questions'. After-school club opportunities and classroom opportunities are presented.

Researchers have demonstrated a correlation between personal value, enjoyment and interest, and sustained engagement in science (Ainley and Ainley 2011). This article presents pedagogical strategies that use drama and discussion to explore students' everyday encounters with science by engaging the body and emotion. Drama-based discussions in…

The paper describes an analysis of the questions posed by high school students regarding relationships between science and religion in a series of debates with scientists in public high schools of the northern part of Portugal. The exploratory interpretation of 171 collected anonymous written questions allowed for the detection of fragilities in…

As introductory chemistry courses expose students to many distinctive properties of matter, it is helpful to systematically evaluate and relate different measures such as mass, moles, and molarity, or specific heat capacity and heat capacity. Intensive and extensive designations help distinguish intrinsic and component properties of a system and…

The paper reports about a study that examines changes in teachers' incorporation of epistemic practices in their design of engineering lessons and compares them to their views about the nature of engineering knowledge across 100 hours of professional development. Nineteen K-8 teachers in the USA, who were new to teaching engineering as part of a…

Adopting an explicit and reflective approach to the teaching of the history and philosophy of science is useful in promoting high school students' understanding of the nature of science. Whereas the history of science is usually signposted clearly in the school science curriculum, the philosophy of science is considered to be embedded in and…

An important step in learning to use math in science is learning to see symbolic equations not just as calculational tools, but as ways of expressing fundamental relationships among physical quantities, of coding conceptual information, and of organizing physics knowledge structures. In this paper, I propose "anchor equations" as a…

Mechanobiology is an interdisciplinary field that aims to understand how physical forces impact biological systems. Enhancing our knowledge of mechanobiology has become increasingly important for understanding human disease and developing novel therapeutics. There is a societal need to teach diverse students principles of mechanobiology so that we…

As a high school AP Physics 1 and 2 teacher, Sean Crumley wanted to create a curricular unit that would authentically connect literacy, opportunities for writing, and science standards while engaging a 21st-century student. This article provides an example of how Crumley incorporated writing into one of his AP physics units, and it could serve as…

An interdisciplinary approach to science education through history of art is proposed. The approach is innovative, as the artworks complement the history, philosophy and sociology of science contents to increase students' interest and motivation. The approach integrates humanities and science education through history of art, which requests…