This article discusses the results of a mainly qualitative study into possible impacts of recent controversial socio-scientific issues on a group of Portuguese secondary school students regarding their conceptions about scientists. The 86 participants: (1) answered a questionnaire with open-ended questions; and (2) wrote a science fiction story…

In his role as a tutor on initial teacher education courses, the author has been particularly interested in strengthening school partnership links in a manner that advances the mentoring in primary science of students working to gain their qualified teacher status. Over the past three years several projects with local primary schools have explored…

Considering geological time as an important epistemological obstacle to the construction of ideas on biological evolution, a study was carried out on the so-called "Darwin Papers". The conclusion was that Charles Darwin's excursion in the Andes during March-April 1835 was a crucial step in this regard. An expedition was carried out in…

A single heartbeat is a complicated process. In Dutch upper secondary biology textbooks this process is illustrated by the classical Wiggers diagram, which usually shows different heart-related quantities, like voltage (ECG), blood pressure, and the heart sounds. It may help students to understand the nature of the Wiggers diagram if they perform…

The ability to use the research literature within a given field is a basic skill that students should acquire as part of their higher education studies. However, undergraduates need support in developing this skill. The use of concept maps as an aid to interrogating the literature is described here. This may help students to highlight key issues…

Problem solving is an ideal learning strategy, especially for topics that are perceived as difficult to teach. As an example, a format is described for a problem-solving session designed to help students understand the pressure-flow hypothesis of phloem transport in plants. Five key facts and their discussion can lead to the conclusion that a…

In this article we use the pendulum as the vehicle for discussing the transition from classical to quantum physics. Since student knowledge of the classical pendulum can be generalized to all harmonic oscillators, we propose that a quantum analysis of the pendulum can lead students into the unanticipated consequences of quantum phenomena at the…

Science teachers continually search for effective ways to help students make sense of science concepts and principles. For students to learn to think more like scientists, science teachers must decrease the number of lectures and "follow-the-recipe" laboratory experiments and increase the use of activities that incorporate student inquiry.…

The question of whether written genres can be learned through explicit teaching or can only be acquired implicitly through writing in authentic contexts remains unanswered. The question is complicated by the different parameters associated with teaching genre to first- or second-language learners, to children or adults, in settings in which the…

Chi (2005) proposed that students experience difficulty in learning about physics concepts such as light, heat, or electric current because they attribute to these concepts an inappropriate ontological status of material substances rather than the more veridical status of emergent processes. Conceptual change could thus be facilitated by training…

This study examines the nature and process of ninth grade students' conceptual change regarding their mental model of dissolution and diffusion as a result of instructions using the Dual Situated Learning Model (DSLM). The dual situated learning events of this model are designed according to the students' ontological viewpoint of the science…

How do we see young children's thinking in science? Is it, as much previous research has led us to believe, that their ideas can be neatly boxed like "brown paper packages tied up with strings"--as the song from "The Sound of Music" goes? Or are their ideas like "wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings" ("Sound of Music"): fluid, complex,…

It has recently been determined that generating an explanatory hypothesis to explain a discrepant event is important for students' conceptual change. The purpose of this study is to investigate how students' generate new explanatory hypotheses. To achieve this goal, questions are used to identify students prior ideas related to electromagnetic…

Using a functional view of language and drawing on extensive classroom data, this article examines a high school science class to see how language was used to connect theory and practice in science register. The article tracks the teaching/learning paths from the introduction to the science topic and teaching of the theory (e.g., technical terms)…

A teacher's scientific understanding has a dramatic impact on students' ability to learn science. This article describes the results of administering the Astronomy Diagnostic Test to 142 science teachers in Wisconsin. The results show that these teachers are lacking a deep, coherent understanding of astronomy concepts. Implications for these…