Discusses research on the effects of having high school students (n=91) read four popular media reports of science. Finds a lack of systemic relationship between students' degree of certainty in their beliefs and the support that the reports offer for those beliefs due to the fact that students seemed unable to fully integrate their background…

Identifies four views of the nature of the science/technology relationship: Idealist, Demarcationist, Materialist, and Interactionist. Analyzes high school physics textbooks in light of these relationship types and finds that the texts are dominated by an idealist storyline that presents a limited view of the history and philosophy of…

Describes a study of the ways in which 9- to 16-year-old students attempted logical problems related to coordinating theory and evidence when the theories in question are scientific. Finds that most students made some reference to evidence in selecting and using their explanations, although most students also seemed capable of holding theory and…

Beginning secondary students find it easier to express their understanding of scientific evidence verbally rather than in writing. Concludes that much work can be done to improve the critical nature of the dialog pupils enter into in their written work, thus making their level of procedural understanding more clear. Contains 27 references.…

Addresses some criticisms of the Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE) project. Offers a different description of the CASE teaching method and presents evidence from the program. Contains 20 references. (Author/WRM)

Organizes a reading of the conceptual change literature that brings into view a collection of design specifications for a conceptual change apparatus. Analyzes one such apparatus in the particulars of a science education demonstration program produced by the Harvard-Smithsonian Private Universe Project. (Contains 114 references.) (Author/WRM)

Summarizes some feminist critiques of science which leads to an investigation of the role that language plays within science. Also explores the ramifications of gendered discourse for the teaching of science and mathematics. Contains 40 references. (Author/PVD)

Investigates the responses of a sample of preservice biology teachers enrolled in a teaching methods course to a casual question about why water rose in a jar inverted over a burning candle placed in a pan of water by formulating and testing six hypotheses. (Contains 43 references.) (Author/YDS)

Contrasts naive beliefs about the nature of science with science as it appears from sociological and philosophical study, feminist critique, and insights from multicultural education. Pragmatic school science is situated within a framework that questions how we know and the recognition that even high-status knowledge can be challenged. (AIM)

Explores early secondary school pupils' written evaluations of media reports of contemporary science research in a classroom setting. Finds little distinction between the nature and extent of secondary pupils' responses as compared to college science students' responses, but finds notable differences between these groups' responses and those of…

Discusses preliminary research on a new heuristic tool for learning from laboratory activities in secondary science. Finds that use of the science writing heuristic facilitated students in generating meaning from data; making connections among procedures, data, evidence, and claims; and engaging in metacognition. (Contains 29 references.)…

Applies three distinct analyses to recorded and transcribed student conversations (n=240) about brine shrimps. The complementary analytic methods provide information on the content of pupils' conversations in terms of the observations made, the ways in which pupils make sense of their observations, and the ways in which students use conversation…

This study developed a Pupils' Nature of Science Scale, including the subscales of the invented and changing nature of science, the role of social negotiation on science, and cultural context on science, to assess early adolescents' views about the nature of science. More than 6,000 fifth and sixth graders in Taiwan responded to the Scale. The…

The purpose of this article is to report findings from an ethnographic study that focused on the co-development of science literacy and academic identity formulation within a third-grade classroom. Our theoretical framework draws from sociocultural theory and studies of scientific literacy. Through analysis of classroom discourse, we identified…

Scientific knowledge is tentative and open to revision. This sense of tentativeness, or changeability, is missing in the way textbooks and teachers often portray the nature of science (NOS). Instead, students are left with the impression that the scientific method produces sure knowledge and that they can uncritically accept the knowledge because…