In 1900, three botanists claimed they had found regularities in inheritance, which soon would be known as Mendel's Laws, without knowing the work of Gregor Mendel or of each other. Their claims of independent (re)discovery have been thoroughly studied during the past decades, with various outcomes. The case is still of interest today as it offers…

"American Biology Teacher" has published over seven dozen articles relevant to the history of biology in biology teaching. They are cataloged here and indexed by topic. As reflected in this archive, teachers adopt a historical approach for many pragmatic motivations: (1) to engage students, by contextualizing science culturally; (2) to…

Background: Science history is a discipline that teaches the development of scientific thought and the discoveries of scientists. However, these topics can sometimes be abstract and difficult to understand. The use of technology can make the teaching of the history of science more effective, engaging, and accessible. By providing students with…

It has been 150 years since D.I. Mendeleev formulated the Periodic law and expressed it visually in the form of a table of elements in 1869. As is clearly well known today, Mendeleev's ideas, confirmed by the discovery of the elements he predicted, turned out to be very promising indeed. However, Mendeleev was not the first, nor the only scientist…

STEM is a well-known acronym describing the intersections of science, technology, engineering, and math. Emerging from this paradigm is a relatively new interdisciplinary model entitled STEAM. STEAM endeavors to intersperse "the arts" into the sciences with the expectation of increasing student engagement and skills within the sciences.…

Teaching false theories goes against the general pedagogical and philosophical belief that we must only teach and learn what is true. In general, the goal of pedagogy is taken to be epistemic: to gain knowledge and avoid ignorance. In this article, I argue that for realists and antirealists alike, epistemological and pedagogical goals have to come…

British scientist John Dalton (1766-1844), French scientist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac (1778-1850), and Italian scientist Amedeo Avogadro (1776-1856) are familiar to many chemistry students. Such students may understand the importance of Dalton's atomic theory, model how Gay-Lussac's law relates the pressure and the temperature of a gas, and use…

Like several scientists, Isaac Newton has been represented many times over many different periods, and portraits of Newton were often commissioned by the scientist himself. These portraits tell us a lot about the scientist, the artist and the cultural context. This article examines two very different portraits of Newton that were realized more…

This article presents the results of an exploratory study of students' knowledge about scientists and countries' contributions to science, aiming at answering two research questions: "In which ways are students aware of the history of scientific development carried out by different people in different places of the world? What can be…

Physics textbooks often present items of disciplinary knowledge in a sequential order of topics of the theory under instruction. Such presentation is usually univocal, that is, isolated from alternative claims and contributions regarding the subject matter in the pertinent scientific discourse. We argue that comparing and contrasting the…

Helen E. Martin, the author of this article, is a retired National Board Certified Teacher who has been researching Sir Isaac Newton's unpublished manuscripts for over three decades. While researching the work of Newton, a teacher she was mentoring asked for some hands-on activities to study planetary motion. The description of the activity…

American K-12 school curricula are often bereft of acknowledgements of the historical contributions of Arab societies to our present-day intellectual heritage, an oversight most apparent in the sciences. Teachers in a thriving democracy are obliged to introduce contemporary scholarship that reflects the contributions of Arab scientists between the…

This paper traces Einstein's discovery of "the equivalence of mass [m] and energy ["E[subscript 0]"]." He came to that splendid insight in 1905 while employed by the Bern Patent Office, at which time he was not an especially ardent reader of physics journals. How then did the young savant, working outside of academia in semi-isolation, realize…

William Herschel (Fig. 1) is rightfully known as one of the greatest astronomers of all time. Born in Hanover (in modern Germany) in 1738, Herschel immigrated to England in 1757 and began a successful career as a professional musician. Later in life Herschel developed a strong interest in astronomy. He began making his own reflecting telescopes in…

This study has the key premise of teaching history and philosophy of physical sciences to illustrate how controversies and rivalries among scientists play a key role in the progress of science and why scientific development is not only founded on the accumulation of experimental data. The author is a defender of teachers who consider…