Scientists and science educators have argued that learners (students, preservice teachers, and inservice teachers) should understand knowledge construction in science, in addition to figuring out disciplinary core ideas. Given this goal, some science education scholars created a construct called the "Nature of Science" (NOS), which aims…

Although formulating a broadly accepted definition of scientific literacy may be challenging, it is widely recognized that Nature of Science (NOS) is an essential component of it. There are different ways to define NOS. In some cases, NOS can be conceptualized through a number of general NOS aspects like for instance science's empirical basis or…

It has been widely accepted in the science education research community that scientific literacy as a concept and phrase was introduced by Paul deHart Hurd in 1958. Recent research into the origins of the phrase, however, has shown this to be incorrect. Its first published use can be traced back, in fact, to 1945, and the phrase was frequently…

One strategy for developing science literacy and scientific literacy in young children is through published trade books. To better understand how science literacy and scientific literacy may be represented in elementary classrooms, we investigated children's books that explore science concepts. Specifically, we examined high-quality science trade…

This thesis identifies and explains the gaps in prior and current applications of representational competence construct in chemistry. Representational competence (RC) describes a set of skills that chemistry researchers Kozma and Russell observed experts demonstrate when engaging with disciplinary representations (Kozma & Russell, 1997; Kozma…

Over a century of attention to "science literacy for all" has not produced a public that can appreciate a common body of core science facts, concepts, and methods; nor have many acquired from their years in K-12 education the ability to apply science learning to everyday problems or to the scientific issues that concern a democracy. Some…

Current science education reform efforts have identified sensemaking as an important goal of science education, and science education researchers have studied what constitutes the sensemaking process in the science classroom. Because the studies of sensemaking are loosely linked to those of scientific reasoning, however, they have provided little…

We investigate learning difficulties among second-year students in electromagnetism courses when they apply Ampère-Maxwell's law. Using phenomenography, we analyzed written answers from 65 undergraduate physics students to four questions on Ampère's and Ampère-Maxwell's laws. We complemented our research by interviewing 12 students. To design the…

In teaching, students' representations could constitute an obstacle to the construction of scientific knowledge and are often considered stable cognitive structures whose organization is sought to be inferred through questionnaires and interviews. This study aims at identifying and analyzing high school students' representations related to the…

Many research studies have shown that lower-secondary school students' scientific literacy depends on their understanding of corresponding scientific concepts. Therefore, it is of great significance to model and assess students' conceptual understanding in learning specific scientific concepts, because it can reflect and diagnose students'…

Today's science education faces the imperative task of developing students' competency to navigate misinformation while broadening the scope of scientific literacy. Traditionally, the concept of epistemic dependence, which encourages public trust in professional scientists, has supported this goal. However, the current landscape of science…

In this paper, we describe student understanding of the "force concept" (basic concepts of Newtonian mechanics) by representing it as a vector-valued quantity, which we refer to as the "score-state vector," in a (30-dimensional) Force Concept Inventory (FCI) score space. We use a large ensemble of FCI results collected…

There is often a steady trajectory of curriculum change under the surface of developments that might seem arbitrary or inconsistent. This article traces the change from key competencies to science capabilities and, most recently, to enduring competencies. All these changes (and names) respond to increasing awareness of the challenges involved in…

Most students have interacted with scientific representations that are used as teaching resources in schools. Often these external representations present challenges for understanding. By utilizing a framework based on an inferential, epistemic approach to scientific representations, we have analyzed students' representational constructions of the…

The current study explores differences in messages that preschool teachers send girls and boys about science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Video footage of a preschool classroom (16 hr; N = 6 teachers; 20 children) was transcribed. Teachers' questions were coded for question-type and whether the question was directed to a boy or a…