The Physics Teacher has published over the years many inspiring papers with an historical slant and we agree with Thomas B. Greenslade, who recently wrote that teaching physics is about "integrating physics with human culture.… if we are going to leave a lasting impact on our students, we should do more than teach them pure physics."…

Most educational literature on conceptual change concerns the process by which introductory students acquire scientific knowledge. However, with modern developments in science and technology, the social significance of learning successive theories is steadily increasing, thus opening new areas of interest to discipline-based education research,…

In high school, and also in introductory physics courses in higher levels of schooling, the law of universal gravitation of planets is introduced by postulating Johannes Kepler's three laws, and later Isaac Newton's law of the inverse of the square of the distance to the Sun. The justification of the laws is only achieved in advanced courses in…

This study investigates whether graduate courses for in-service physics teacher professional development that combine the conceptual history of physics, physics content, and physics education research readings will result in the teachers using the history of science for their own classroom instruction. In a study conducted in the USA, teachers who…

We describe an educational activity that can be completed with mobile media devices in order to understand the working principle of a pair of tuning forks, from the Historical Collection of Physics Instruments of the University of Palermo, and how they were used to explain acoustic interference and beats with the Lissajous optical method. This…

Many physics learners take the specific mathematical representations they are using as part of their learning and doing physics for granted. The paper addresses this problem by highlighting two goals. The first is to show how a historical investigation from history of science can be transformed into a concrete lesson plan in physics, in a physics…

Science educators are increasingly using a historical approach to pedagogy as a way to enable students to understand the process of the construction of science in a more contextualized manner. Considering the meaning of context in a broader sense, this article has two objectives. First, it aims to explore how physics lessons using a Cultural…

Literature in science education positions questions as the launching point for scientific inquiry, and widely used standards, such as the Next Generation Science Standards often state: "Science begins with a question" (NGSS Lead States, 2013). Questions have generally been studied for their role in sparking student inquiry or helping…

Background: Achieving the targeted of university physics courses and improving student motivation requires varying types of instructional design. One alternative approach to the traditional lecture format involves the use of historical science stories, which are narratives that present episodes from the life of a scientist, as well as…

Introductory lab courses have been a staple of the physics curriculum for over 100 years. Yet these courses are now poised for change as recent research shows that they do not meet a frequent goal of enhancing student understanding of lecture content. In thinking about how to move forward, a look back at experiment courses in history seems wise.…

This study considers the short list of Nature of Science (NOS) features frequently published and widely known in the science education discourse. It is argued that these features were oversimplified and a refinement of the claims may enrich or sometimes reverse them. The analysis shows the need to address the range of variation in each particular…

We present a method to analyse how pre-service science teachers relate events, ideas, characters and deeds in history of science and in cultural and general history. A group of 25 students presented their views they deemed to be of importance in history of science, culture, society and politics in era between 1550 and 1850. The sample is based on…

In this study, we examined the teaching emphasis of the history of science (HOS) in science lesson plans. The examination was based on a five-dimensional framework, which comprises conceptual, procedural, epistemological, affectional, and social dimensions. Content analysis was employed as the research methodology, targeting 71 copies of science…

Winston Churchill once said of Russia that it was a riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma. Were the British Bulldog a physicist, he might have been talking of something other than our Slavic comrades. He might have been talking about an electron. This article covers the more modern representations of the electron. A brief reminder of the…

In a deep and dark corner of space, a cataclysm loomed. Two cosmic nemeses circled one another, locked in a macabre dance of death. Unfolding over millennia, the deadly waltz began leisurely enough. But with the dance came radiation and the energy loss that it implies. Orbit after orbit, the distance between the two protagonists shrank as their…