Research shows that various stereotypes about science and science learning, such as science being filled with hard and dry content, laboratory experiments, and male-dominated work environments, have resulted in feelings of distance from science in students' minds. This study explores children's experiences of science learning and science identity.…

Adoption of science content standards that include anthropogenic climate change has prompted widespread instruction in climate change for the first time. However, the controversial nature of the topic can be daunting and many teachers share misconceptions that lead to weak treatment of climate change in classrooms. Nevertheless, numerous teachers…

When conducting scientific research, experts in molecular and cellular biology (MCB) use specific reasoning strategies to construct mechanistic explanations for the underlying causal features of molecular phenomena. We explored how undergraduate students applied this scientific practice in MCB. Drawing from studies of explanation building among…

Science standards in the U.S. have shifted to emphasise science and engineering process skills (i.e. specific practices within inquiry) to a greater extent than previous standards' emphases on broad representations of inquiry. This study examined the alignment between second-career science teachers' personal histories with the latter and examined…

Despite a growing consensus regarding the value of inquiry-based learning (IBL) for students' learning and engagement in the science classroom, the implementation of such practices continues to be a challenge. If science teachers are to use IBL to develop students' inquiry practices and encourage them to think and act as scientists, a better…

An understanding of the scientific enterprise is useful because citizens need to make systematic, rational decisions about projects involving scientific endeavors and technology, and a clearer understanding of scientific epistemology is beneficial because it could encourage more public engagement with science. The purpose of this study was to…

Over the last 20 years, science education studies have reported that there are very different understandings among students of science regarding the key aspects of climate change. We used the cognitive linguistic framework of experientialism to shed new light on this valuable pool of studies to identify the conceptual resources of understanding…

This study aimed to elucidate college freshmen science students, secondary science teachers, and scientists' perceptions of "scientific" argument; to compare participants' perceptions with Stephen Toulmin's analytical framework of argument; and to characterize the criteria that participants deployed when assessing the "quality"…

The present article presents a rubric we developed for assessing the quality of scientific explanations by science graduate students. The rubric was developed from a qualitative analysis of science graduate students' abilities to explain their own research to an audience of non-scientists. Our intention is that use of the rubric to characterise…

The often portrayed media image of the scientist is a rather strange one, grim-looking scientists, usually male, poised beside incomprehensible instruments. It is little wonder that we encounter the stereotype of the bespectacled scientist; thick black rims, coke bottle lenses, roman sandals, dressed in lab coats, trousers up to their necks. A…

In this article the authors resort to a qualitative analysis of the plot of science fiction stories about a group of scientists, written by two 11th-grade Earth and Life Science students (aged 17), and to semi-structured interviews, with the double purpose of diagnosing their conceptions of the nature of science (namely, as regards scientists'…