Recently, Greta Thunberg has strongly increased environmental awareness with the climate strikes and the resulting Fridays for Future movement. But what does environmentally friendly behavior look like? In today's society, it is a sort of common sense that one should recycle. From an early age, we are taught in school that recycling conserves…

Extant literature on teacher preparation suggests that preservice teachers learn best when they are immersed in a community that allows them to develop dispositions, knowledge, and practical skills and share with the community a strong vision of what good teaching entails. However, even if the requisite dispositions, knowledge, and skills in…

As former and current STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) school teachers in Singapore, we explore the challenges we both experienced while teaching at different STEM schools. Through this article, we make a case for the teacher preparation programs locally and around the world to give more attention to a changing education…

A great amount of research has been carried out world-wide to promote history of science as a powerful science teaching tool. Because the ways of choosing and using historical elements depend on teachers' or researchers' educational purpose, any attempt to support a single model-to-use seems difficult and probably irrelevant. However,…

In the Department of Physics, University of Helsinki, there are advanced physics courses designed for the needs of pre-service physics teachers. The starting point is that after introductory and intermediate physics courses, pre-service physics teachers know laws and definitions but the knowledge is quite fragmented and does not form coherent…

A number of science education policy documents recommend that students develop an understanding of the enterprise of science and the nature of science (NOS). Despite this emphasis, there is still a gap between policy and practice. Teacher professional literature provides one potential venue for bridging this gap, by providing "activities that…

The La Trobe University iteration of the Teaching Teachers for the Future (TTF) project focused initially on subject in the second semester, third year of the Bachelor of Education course called the Multi-Disciplinary Science & Technology Integrated Experience (MSTIE). Two pairs of pre-service teachers were placed in the school where the TTF…

Despite the expressed need for high-quality science education, very little research has been conducted on what middle school science learning opportunities look like in practice. This study was conducted in support of "Strengthening Science Education in California", a research, policy, and communications initiative. Partners in this…

The aim of this study is to investigate pre-service teachers' understanding of and difficulties with some core concepts in the special theory of relativity. The pre-service teachers (n = 185) from the Departments of Physics Education and Elementary Science Education at Dokuz Eylul University (in Turkey) participated. Both quantitative and…

Teaching Opportunities for Partners in Science (TOPS) is an outreach program using volunteers (the "partners") for: 1) assisting teachers in grades K-8 with preparation and delivery of science and engineering (S&E) lessons in the classroom; 2) providing content knowledge to teachers when needed to teach quality science and…

In this study the relationship between pre-service chemistry teachers' beliefs about teaching and their pedagogical content knowledge were investigated. The sample of the study consists of 99 pre-service chemistry teachers attending Hacettepe University, Faculty of Education. As data collection tools the adapted form of "Beliefs About…

This article reports on issues arising from the external evaluation of a teacher development project--the Active Learning in Primary Science (ALPS) project--undertaken in eight Bristol (UK) primary schools during 2007. The ALPS project aimed to raise pupil attainment in science by developing participating teachers' skills, knowledge and enthusiasm…

An adequate understanding of the nature of science (NOS) is essential for science teachers. The Myths of Science Questionnaire (MOSQ) consisting of 14 items, which comprised both optional and written types of response, was utilized to explore 113 Thai preservice and 101 inservice science teachers' understanding and reasoning about the NOS,…

This paper explores the development of student-teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) during pre-service education. Four student-teachers in mathematics and science participated in a project teaching physics to students aged 9-11 years once a week over a 12-month period. One-third of the lessons were videotaped and the student-teachers were…

In this article we review the notion of teacher knowledge from four metaphorical standpoints--teacher knowledge as "computer", as "craft", as "complexity" and as "change". We employ each of these metaphors to examine and analyse the work of one teacher of science. We draw implications from our analysis for teacher education, teacher development…