Critical thinking is one of the most desirable outcomes of education, yet it is often not well defined in curricula. Additionally, there are open questions concerning the domain specificity of critical thinking. In this work, we present two studies aimed at secondary education. Starting from Halpern's conceptualisation of critical thinking we…

This research documents the impact of a teaching interview aimed at developing a critical attitude in students, and focused on a particular topic: radiocarbon dating. This teaching interview is designed to observe students' reaction to limited written explanations of the phenomenon under study, and their possible frustration or intellectual…

This paper presents an epistemological analysis of typical didactical activities noted in early-years science lessons, which was carried out in an attempt to diagnose the extent to which the teaching practices adopted by early-years educators are successful in supporting young children's understanding in science. The analysis of didactical…

This study reports findings from an analysis of the 2002 Chinese National Physics Curriculum Guidelines and the alignment between the curriculum guidelines and two most recent provincial-level 12th-grade exit examinations in China. Both curriculum guidelines and test content were represented using two-dimensional matrices (i.e., topic by level of…