How do undergraduates use biological principles to guide their reasoning when solving novel problems? Is it an effective strategy? To address these questions, we analyzed real-time discussions from small groups of students in an Introductory Organismal Biology course. We created a reasoning framework to characterize how students activated and…

The current study aimed to examine the structural relationships between pre-service science teachers' intention to teach and perceptions of the nature of science (NOS) and attitudes toward teaching science. The sample consisted of 206 pre-service science teachers from a major university in the United Arab Emirates who have bachelor's degrees in…

Beginning 60 years ago, Thomas Kuhn has had a significant impact across the academy and on culture more widely. And he had a great impact on science education research, theorising, and pedagogy. For the majority of educators, the second edition (1970) of his "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (Kuhn, 1970a) articulated the very nature…

The statics of fluids may seem simple at first but often poses problems for students when it comes to applying it to concrete cases. Despite its relatively simple laws, some subtleties, mainly related to the elastic characteristics of a fluid, must be noted. This elasticity allows the pressure exerted in a part of the fluid to propagate in its…

This paper has a pedagogical aim. Indeed, by using the relativistic velocity-addition and Einstein's equivalence principle (EEP), we want to analyse in a simple way the physics of time on a rotating non-inertial frame. We use a didactic approach considering four friends. The first is in the laboratory, the second at rest on the disk at radius r,…

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…

It has been shown that many people do not understand how scientific knowledge is built and accepted, even after scientific education. One way to deal with this problem is through teaching about the Nature of Science (NOS). NOS can be understood as a pedagogical construct aiming to foster the understanding of the main characteristics of scientific…

This study used the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model to analyze pre-service teachers' views on the nature of science (NOS). This approach can be used to automate the classification of documents, and at the same time, the researcher does not need to deduce with a NOS framework prior to evaluation. Participants were 155 pre-service…

In this article, a guide is presented to help biology teachers so that they can process the subject of the eye and eye defects with an interdisciplinary approach. The guide, which was created by considering the stages of a lesson plan, includes content information, suggestions, and various directions that can help the teacher at every stage. The…

In a sample of 323 engineering students, structural equation modeling was used to test hypothesized relationships between beliefs about the nature of knowledge in science, beliefs about the process of justification for knowing in science, and argumentative reasoning about an ill-structured social-scientific issue. Beliefs about justification for…

The notion of function is central in all of the secondary curriculum, and indeed functional models appear in almost all higher education that is based on mathematics. However, in secondary education, functions usually appear in restricted and somewhat sterile forms. In this (mostly theoretical) paper, we present a proposal -- exemplified by a…

One of the biggest challenges when teaching chemistry at the elementary and secondary levels arises from the conceptual gap between the ontology of macroscopic objects and agents and an ontology where the relevant objects behind macroscopic phenomena are, in fact, inaccessible to our senses. This work employs tools from the general philosophy of…

The family resemblance approach to nature of science is receiving increasing attention by science educators since its inception about a decade ago. Many scholars of science education have contributed and continue to contribute to it not only theoretically but also by applying it empirically to a wide range of areas such as curriculum and textbook…

Interfacial, or surface tension, is a significant topic in chemical education. This paper describes the directional motion of gallium-based liquid metal drops, resulting from a difference of interfacial tension across the drop. This demonstration can engage students in discovering the underlying chemical principles. A mechanism for the drop's…

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…