Contemporary sciences, including the didactics of science, employ computational simulations as tools in their academic endeavors. The construction and application of these simulations are of interest to didactics as they contribute to shaping new perspectives on scientific activity. Consequently, they warrant special attention in…

Scientists and science educators have argued that learners (students, preservice teachers, and inservice teachers) should understand knowledge construction in science, in addition to figuring out disciplinary core ideas. Given this goal, some science education scholars created a construct called the "Nature of Science" (NOS), which aims…

While some researchers argue that theories and abstract knowledge are unreliable bases for teachers' work, a wide range of research stresses the need to overcome the gap between theory and practice, or abstract academic knowledge and experience-based knowledge. Here, Silvia Edling maintains that it is relevant to ask why the relationship is…

Despite the abundance of literature discussing Kuhnian views, it is rare to find studies that comprehensively compare the arguments of Kuhnian supporters and skeptics. This study aims to fill the gap by providing a comparative review and synthesis between the two groups of views using the systematic literature review (SLR) analysis technique. The…

This systematic review summarized 42 selected empirical studies on the representations of nature of science (NOS) in science textbooks guided by three theoretical frameworks, which are the four-theme scientific literacy (SL), the consensus view on nature of science (CV), and the family resemblance approach to the nature of science (FRA). This…

Developing an adequate understanding of the nature of science includes developing an understanding of the uses and importance of models in science. General accounts of science aimed at university students, however, tend to neglect this aspect. A noticeable exception is the simple model of the key elements of a scientific result presented by Giere,…

This study explored the impact of an extended explicit-reflective instruction through a triple blended learning environment (triple-BLE) on pre-service science teachers' (PSTs) views of the nature of science (NOS). The triple-BLE included face-to-face (F2F), online, and out-of-school time (OST) engagement over two semesters. The study employed a…

In this article, we tackle the phenomenon of what seems to be a misunderstanding between science education theory and philosophy of science--one which does not seem to have received any attention in the literature. While there seems to be a consensus within the realm of science education on limiting or altogether denying the explanatory role of…

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…

This paper provides a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of the relationship between Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) education and the Nature of Science. From the Web of Science platform, 8,546 articles were analyzed to address four key research topics: publication trends over time, primary academic fields…

In a sample of 323 engineering students, structural equation modeling was used to test hypothesized relationships between beliefs about the nature of knowledge in science, beliefs about the process of justification for knowing in science, and argumentative reasoning about an ill-structured social-scientific issue. Beliefs about justification for…

The notion of function is central in all of the secondary curriculum, and indeed functional models appear in almost all higher education that is based on mathematics. However, in secondary education, functions usually appear in restricted and somewhat sterile forms. In this (mostly theoretical) paper, we present a proposal -- exemplified by a…

Electricity and magnetism are fundamentally interconnected, as represented by the symmetry in Maxwell's equations. Much of the research on Gauss's and Ampere's laws has focused on their application in calculating electric or magnetic fields. However, there remains a significant gap in the literature in exploring these laws in a broader…

Scientific literacy is an organizing principle for K-16 education but is notoriously difficult to operationalize. This study provides a list of instruments that measure aspects of Vision II scientific literacy, or science for citizenship. Based on the definition of scientific literacy by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and…

As students read scientific texts created in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools, they need to draw on their epistemic knowledge of GenAI as well as that of science. However, only a few research discussed multimodality as a methodological approach in characterising students' ideas of GenAI-science epistemic reading. This study…