Erduran and Dagher's (2014) account of the Family Resemblance Approach (FRA) to Nature of Science (NOS) is a relatively new framework that frames NOS in a holistic fashion, inclusive of cognitive-epistemic and social-institutional aspects. This approach has also been referred to as the "Reconceptualized Family Resemblance Approach to Nature…

Reconceptualized Family Resemblance Approach to Nature of Science (RFN) explains science as a cognitive, epistemic, and social institutional system. The aim of this study is to examine the inclusion of Nature of Science (NOS) in the 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grade Turkish middle school science textbooks. The "content," "activity,"…

An important goal of science education is for students to understand the nature of science. Science education has raised the question of what science is, how scientific knowledge is developed and how people participate in this process under the conceptual umbrella of 'nature of science' (NOS). This study aims to look at the effectiveness of the…

The aim of this study is to examine how the nature of science dimensions are represented in the secondary school 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grade science textbooks of the last twenty years. It is also within the scope of the research to investigate how these dimensions in the textbooks changed during the twenty years. The document analysis method was…

Epistemological beliefs, including the source of knowledge, the certainty of knowledge, the organization of knowledge, the control of learning, and the speed of learning, are important to identify since these beliefs impact students' learning processes and how they attribute meaning to life. Concept cartoons, that students find genuine and…

What better way to engage fifth-grade students in science and engineering practices than to use paper airplanes to encourage them to question, explore, create, and test designs! This multi-day unit draws from a fourth-grade curriculum (Pearson 2012) aligned with the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS Lead States 2013) used in…

Mind maps that contain visual and verbal elements can be thought of as an effective graphical tool that can be used to reveal the existing knowledge, opinions and perceptions of individuals about a concept through mental association. In this study, the aim was to determine the mental models of middle school students related to science by using…

A "Framework for K-12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards" ("NGSS") are intended for all students, hence "all standards, all students" (NGSS Lead States 2013). To make this vision a reality, the "NGSS" highlight three key instructional shifts: (1) explain phenomena or design solutions…

This study is based on the Reconceptualised Family Resemblance Approach to Nature of Science (Kaya & Erduran, 2016), which explains science as a cognitive, epistemic, and social-institutional system. A content analysis of Turkish science curricula shows that the social context of science is underemphasised (Kaya & Erduran, 2016).…

This column presents ideas and techniques to enhance your science teaching. This month's issue shares information on how students' everyday experiences can support science learning through engineering design. In this article, the authors outline a reverse-engineering model of instruction and describe one example of how it looked in our fifth-grade…

The Next Generation Science Standards support understanding of the nature of science as it is practiced and experienced in the real world through interconnected concepts to be imbedded within scientific practices and crosscutting concepts. This study explored how fourth and fifth grade elementary students' views of nature of science change when…

Background: There is a growing interest in investigating attitudes towards science and views of Nature of Science among elementary grade students in terms of gender, cultural backgrounds, and grade level variables. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the attitudes toward science and views of Nature of Science among Spanish students,…

Background: Uncertainty is a crucial element of scientific knowledge growth. Students should have some understanding of how science knowledge is developed and why scientific conclusions are considered more or less certain than others. A component of the nature of science, it is considered an important aspect of science education and allows…

This study aims to examine fifth grade students' level of associating daily life events with the subject "changes of state" in the science curriculum. Among the qualitative research methods, special case method was used in the study. Seven open-ended questions about the changing states of matter were used for data collection. These…

One tried-and-true way to hook students' attention and promote long-lasting understanding is to sequence science instruction in an explore-before-explain instructional sequence. In these lessons for the second through sixth grade band, elementary students investigate the interaction between "cold" and "hot" substances and…