The potassium salt is an easy product to synthesize in an introductory course on inorganic chemistry and the students are required to prepare this product in order to improve their laboratory skills and as an introduction to the synthesis of coordination compounds. The complex potassium tris (oxalato) ferrate (III) is used to illustrate the…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between student understanding of the nature of science and their problem-solving strategies. Six hundred and twenty Year 8 students in Taiwan twice completed two conceptual problem-solving tests and a questionnaire on the nature of science. Four of these students were selected for follow-up…

This study investigates student conceptualizations of the nature of science (NOS) and how students interpret and evaluate conflicting evidence regarding a socioscientific issue. Eighty-four high school students participated in the study by reading contradictory reports about the status of global warming and responding to questions designed to…

This study investigated prospective secondary science teachers' understandings of and intentions to teach about scientific modelling in the context of a model-based instructional module. Qualitative methods were used to explore the influence of instruction using dynamic computer modelling. Participants included 14 secondary science prospective…

This article describes a research study concerning students' conceptions and reasonings about fluids and pressure in static situations. After a preliminary survey involving interviews and observations in class, some written questions were answered by various groups, totalling 428 Italian and French pupils in upper secondary school, 458 first-year…

The children from Locks Heath Junior School, Southampton, had perceptive and thoughtful views about "Why science?" In this paper, the children share their thoughts about what science is and why they think it is important. This paper presents only a small selection of their far-ranging thoughts on the subject. The emphasis on…

Galileo's discovery of the properties of pendulum motion depended on his adoption of the novel methodology of idealisation. Galileo's laws of pendulum motion could not be accepted until the empiricist methodological constraints placed on science by Aristotle, and by common sense, were overturned. As long as scientific claims were judged by how the…

The history of science shows that for each scientific issue there may be more than one models that are simultaneously accepted by the scientific community. One such case concerns the wave and corpuscular models of light. Newton claimed that he had proved some properties of light based on a set of minimal assumptions, without any commitments to any…

The purpose of this research was to explore how adult users interact and learn during an interactive computer-based simulation supplemented with brief multimedia explanations of the content. A total of 52 college students interacted with a computer-based simulation of Newton's laws of motion in which they had control over the motion of a simple…

For science teachers, implementing inquiry for the first time can seem intimidating. Inquiry-based curriculum requires teachers to design experiences that engage students in scientific phenomena through direct observation, data gathering, and analysis of evidence. Replacing familiar routines and conventional methods with inquiry may seem outside…

The overall purpose of this analysis is to clarify whether or not teachers' conceptions of the nature of science (NOS) influence their instructional planning and classroom practices based on several significant research studies which have recently been published. Science process skills provide a basis in the major science disciplines for children…

University of Chicago literary critic W.J.T. Mitchell claims that his contribution to the cultural interpretation and hermeneutic understanding of dinosaurs is every bit as valuable as archeological discoveries. Indeed, he holds that, because of his new way of looking at dinosaurs, the title "scientist" should aptly apply to him, too.…

A course module in general chemistry focusing on predicting the products of simple inorganic reactions is described. This component of the course is intended to be presented near the end of the last term of the general chemistry sequence and is designed to afford practice in applying the variety of principles encountered throughout the general…

Restriction enzymes are basic tools in recombinant DNA technology. To shape the molecular biology experiments, the students must know how to work with these molecular scissors. Here, we describe an integrated set of experiments, introduced in the "Advances in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology" postgraduate course, which covers the important…

Following the brewing process from grain to glass, this course uses the biological and chemical principles of brewing to teach science to the nonscience major. Discussion of the scientific aspects of malting, mashing, fermentation, and the making of different beer styles is complemented by laboratory exercises that use scientific methods to…