A Cartesian conception of material space views each part as external to every other part: "partes extra partes." Because two material things cannot occupy the same space, each of it exists in itself, separated by a boundary from everything else, including other things. This ontology is the origin of thinking the world in terms of…

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…

As part of a series of investigations in which we explore the integration of verbal and nonverbal aspects of communication into a dialectical, sense-constitutive unit during science lectures, this study adapts the notions of catchments (i.e., repetitions of essential features of the gesture-speech dialectic) and growth points (i.e., moments in…

In an effort to promote integrated STEM education, the Malaysian government has integrated STEM teaching framework within the science and mathematics curriculum specifications to guide the science and mathematics teachers to design and implement interdisciplinary teaching while teaching science and/or mathematics concepts. Some of the factors that…

For many students, the experience with science tends to be alienating and uprooting. In this study, I take up Simone Weil's concepts of "enracinement" (rooting) and "déracinement" (uprooting) to theorize the root of this alienation, the confrontation between children's familiarity with the world and unfamiliar/strange…

The aim of this study is to advance current understanding of the transactional processes that characterize students' sense-making practices when they are confronted with multiple representations of scientific phenomena. Data for the study are derived from a design experiment that involves a technology-rich, inquiry-based sequence of…

"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…

There are some who experience irreconcilable differences between their religious beliefs concerning a world created as is, on the one hand, and a scientific view of the world that has developed by means of natural evolution over billions of years, on the other hand. In this special issue, scholars from very different religions, backgrounds, and…

Over the past three decades, science educators have accumulated a vast amount of information on conceptions--variously defined as beliefs, ontologies, cognitive structures, mental models, or frameworks--that generally (at least initially) have been derived from interviews about certain topics. During the same time period, cultural studies has…

Inscriptions are central to the practice of science. Previous studies showed, however, that preservice teachers even those with undergraduate degrees in science, generally do not spontaneously produce inscriptions that economically summarize large amounts of data. This study was designed to investigate the production of inscription while a group…

Thinking about macroscopic phenomena in terms of models based on the idea of microscopic particles (i.e., the particulate theory of matter) is one of the important goals for student learning in chemistry around the world. However, previous research suggests that students do not easily understand phenomena from a particle perspective, although such…

Uses videotaped lectures and interviews to understand lectures in a physics course for prospective elementary teachers. Reports that the professor staged Aristotle, natural philosophy, and students' observations and intuitive knowledge in opposition to Galileo, controlled experiments, and mathematical inscriptions. Concludes that this form of…

This male-specific study examined the development of integrated process skill in the context of open-inquiry laboratory sessions. Findings from this qualitative study indicate that male students develop higher-order process skills through nontraditional laboratory experiences that provided the students with freedom to perform experiments of…

Presents a study that analyzes an extensive database consisting of the written and oral discourse of students (N=23) as they described their thoughts on ontology, epistemology, and sociology of scientific knowledge. Contains 51 references. (DDR)

Investigates the practices required for reading graphs in high school textbooks and scientific journals. Discusses the role of high school textbooks in the appropriation of authentic scientific graph-related practices. Finds that scientific journals provide more resources to facilitate graph reading and feature more elaborate descriptions and…