Sound is a very omnipresent physical phenomenon that plays a crucial role in our daily lives. It is essential for verbal communication and helps us orient ourselves. Children are especially affected by sound and its presence in their daily lives. This circumstance, and the subject-specific interesting facets of the topic of sound, make this…

Scientific literacy not only involves scientific content relative to each branch of science, as a scientifically literate person is also aware of what science is, as well as how it operates in a broader and complex sense. Therefore, in order to develop and implement successful methodologies in the classroom aiming to improve students' scientific…

There has been sustained research interest in the role of early career researchers in advancing the field and the challenges that they face. However, efforts to document lived experiences of researchers working in a specific research area within science education have been scarce. This paper considers the meaning of innovation in the context of…

Research indicates that students' interest in science decreases during their school years. To counteract this, a quasi-experimental instructional intervention was designed in which we addressed students' leisure interests to foster their (situational) interest in physics. Students in the intervention group got the opportunity to choose topics…

Explicit-reflective nature of science (NOS) instruction has demonstrated a positive impact on student learning. Although explicit-reflective NOS instruction often consists of questions that draw students' attention to NOS ideas, there are few recommendations in the science education literature about how the form of these questions might inform NOS…

Values and how values are created in science education are an under-researched field, which is problematic given the importance of epistemic values to the nature of science. From a sociological perspective, values are experienced as emotionally infused ideas with the power to influence choices and actions in everyday situations such as learning…

While the importance of explicit and reflective NOS instruction is clear in the literature, questions remain about how to enact such instruction. That is, literature is sometimes unclear in defining how to enact explicit and reflective NOS instruction. While some authors recommend using questions (e.g., Clough 2007) to enact effective NOS…

This qualitative study analyses how effective an activity based on the critical and reflexive reading of the historical case of Rosalind Franklin and the elucidation of the molecular structure of DNA can be for learning about the nature of science (NOS). The aspects of NOS addressed are the plurality of methods in scientific research, research…

This study investigates how Grade 12 secondary school students in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) perceive and respond to teaching and learning on evolution. A mixed-methodology approach including a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews was used. The study shows that Saudi students are aware of the great significance that has been…

The relationship between science and society has, for many years, been the subject of debate in different fields, and various proposals have been made regarding the kind of science education that citizens require. The present study considers an understanding of the nature of science (NOS) to be one of the key competences that citizens should…

The nature of science (NOS) has been recognised as an essential component for engagement with socioscientific issues (SSI). However, the findings on the link between the two have been inconclusive. This calls for a shift from students merely knowing about NOS, to using their understanding of it as a tool for decision-making and participation in…

There is an increasing demand in the field of science education for the incorporation of philosophical and sociological aspects that are related to the scientific enterprise in school curricula, to the extent that the incorporation of these aspects is now considered a necessity. Several of these aspects can be categorised within the framework of…

The goal of this study was to examine the way preservice science teachers depict and develop their understanding of nature of science (NOS), from the perspective of the family resemblance approach (FRA). FRA defines NOS as a Cognitive-Epistemic and Social-Institutional system. Appling the dual-analytic approach via reflective drawing analysis, we…

Contrary to the situation at primary, middle, and secondary school levels, university science courses provide students with very few opportunities to reflect upon the nature of science (NOS). The first goal of this study was to provide evidence that the co-construction of evolutionary trees, an important component of university biology education,…

The effective continuing professional development (CPD) programs primarily aim to have an impact on teachers' knowledge bases, beliefs, and views and their classroom practices, which rationally lead most of the researchers to investigate those changes on teachers primarily. Although neglected, the interrelationship between CPD programs and…