The link between science education and early childhood education is still blurred. This is so because many science education researchers apparently, but mistakenly, believe that the way young children interrogate and investigate the world around them is not appropriate for their understanding of scientific concepts. Although there is an effort…

Science education can be alienating for students, as it is apart from the mundane world with which they are familiar. Science education research has approached the gap between everyday understandings and science learning largely as a challenge arising while learning about science concepts and the kinds of instructional approaches that may support…

The crisis of education frequently is framed in terms of methods, where quantitative research is accused of making the subject invisible through quantification, whereas qualitative research is credited for the emphasis on subjectivity and the discursive construction of reality. Such formulations fail to take into account a long-standing critique…

In this article we present an analytical framework for approaching transfer episodes--episodes in which participants declare or can be declared to bring prior experience to bear on the current task organization. We build on Dewey's writings about the continuity of experience, Vygotsky's ideas of unit analysis, as well as more recent developments…

"Experience" is one of the most used terms in (science) education, and it is recognized as being related to learning (education). Yet "what" experience is and "how" it is related to learning and change remains untheorized. In this paper, we mainly draw on the work of J. Dewey and L. S. Vygotsky but also on M. Bakhtin…