This study used video vignettes of historical episodes from documentary films as a context and instructional tool to promote pre-service science teachers' (PSTs) conceptions of the nature of science (NOS). The participants received explicit-reflective NOS instruction, and were introduced to techniques to be able to use scenes from documentary…

Most students enter their first university physics course with a system of beliefs and intuitions which are often inconsistent with the Newtonian frame of reference. This article presents an experiment of collaborative learning aiming at helping first-year students in an engineering programme to transition from their naïve intuition about dynamics…

In this paper we focus on how South African students' ideas about the human body are constituted in their descriptions of three different scenarios involving the pathway of a sandwich, a painkiller and a glass of water through the body. In particular, we have studied the way in which the students transferred ideas between the sandwich and the…

A critical aspect of teacher education is gaining pedagogical content knowledge of how to teach science for conceptual understanding. Given the time limitations of college methods courses, it is difficult to touch on more than a fraction of the science topics potentially taught across grades K-8, particularly in the context of relevant pedagogies.…

Seeking to increase conceptual understanding by sustaining adolescents' engagement and interest in secondary science classrooms, an intervention, the Engagement Model of Academic Literacy for Learning (EngageALL), was designed to implement a disciplinary literacy approach and organize instruction according to characteristics of student interest…

This study attempts to determine whether there exists a negative interconnection between the creative and testable nature-of-science (NOS) conceptions in college students' conceptual ecology by investigating, through a pair of IHV-assisted teaching experiments, the effect of raising the status of each NOS conception in students' conceptual ecology…