A new chronology is introduced to address the history of chemistry, with educational purposes, particularly for the end of the twentieth century and here identified as the fifth chemical revolution. Each revolution are considered in terms of the Kuhnian notion of ‘exemplar,’ rather than ‘paradigm.’ This approach enables the incorporation of instruments, as well as concepts and the rise of new subdisciplines into the revolutionary process and provides a more adequate representation of such periods of development and consolidation. The fifth (...) revolution developed from 1973 to 1999 and is characterized by a deep transformation in the very heart of chemistry. That is to say, the size and type of objects, the way in which they must be done and the time in which they are transformed. In one way or another, chemistry’ limits had been set out. (shrink)

A layered interpretation of the history of chemistry is discussed through chemical revolutions. A chemical revolution mainly by emplacement, instead of replacement, procedures were identified by: a radical reinterpretation of existing thought recognized by contemporaries themselves, which means the appearance of new concepts and the arrival of new theories; the use of new instruments changed the way in which its practitioners looked and worked in the world and through exemplars, new entities were discovered or incorporated; the opening of new subdisciplines, (...) which produced, separated scientific communities. The fourth chemical revolution, fundamentally characterized by the incorporation of new instruments in chemical practices is discussed. (shrink)

Ever since Thomas Kuhn's influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), textbooks have suffered a bad reputation. They have been accused of distorting—at times purportedly—history and of feeding students with an unacceptably simplified and optimistic view of science. This attitude started to change only in recent times. With the increase of attention paid not only to how theories are conceived, but also how they are practiced, disseminated, and appropriated, historians have rehabilitated textbooks as a legitimate site of knowledge production. In (...) this paper, I adopt textbooks as an instrument to unfold multiple facets of the culture that allowed quantum physics to flourish between 1900 and the early 1930s. I organize the article around two stories about two major textbooks, i.e., Sommerfeld′s Atombau und Spektrallinien and Dirac′s Principles of Quantum Mechanics. I explore the complex pedagogical cultures underlying these two masterpieces and how they intersect local agendas. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Recruitment into the scientific community is one oft-stated goal of science education—in the post-Sputnik United States, for example—but this obscures the fact that science textbooks are often read by people who will never be scientists. It cannot be presupposed that science textbooks for younger audiences, students in primary and secondary schools, function in this way. For this reason, precollegiate-level science textbooks are sometimes discussed as a subset of literature popularizing science. The high school science classroom and the textbook are (...) forums for exposing the public to science. The role of governments and educational institutions in regulating the consumption of these texts not only determines which books are used; it influences how they are written, read, and deemed authoritative. Therefore such science textbooks should not be seen as (at best) the disjunction of texts-for-training and books-for-popularization. A changing sense of what “textbooks” are compels a different understanding of their use in the history of science. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Recruitment into the scientific community is one oft-stated goal of science education—in the post-Sputnik United States, for example—but this obscures the fact that science textbooks are often read by people who will never be scientists. It cannot be presupposed that science textbooks for younger audiences, students in primary and secondary schools, function in this way. For this reason, precollegiate-level science textbooks are sometimes discussed as a subset of literature popularizing science. The high school science classroom and the textbook are (...) forums for exposing the public to science. The role of governments and educational institutions in regulating the consumption of these texts not only determines which books are used; it influences how they are written, read, and deemed authoritative. Therefore such science textbooks should not be seen as (at best) the disjunction of texts-for-training and books-for-popularization. A changing sense of what “textbooks” are compels a different understanding of their use in the history of science. (shrink)

This inaugural handbook documents the distinctive research field that utilizes history and philosophy in investigation of theoretical, curricular and pedagogical issues in the teaching of science and mathematics. It is contributed to by 130 researchers from 30 countries; it provides a logically structured, fully referenced guide to the ways in which science and mathematics education is, informed by the history and philosophy of these disciplines, as well as by the philosophy of education more generally. The first handbook to cover the (...) field, it lays down a much-needed marker of progress to date and provides a platform for informed and coherent future analysis and research of the subject. -/- The publication comes at a time of heightened worldwide concern over the standard of science and mathematics education, attended by fierce debate over how best to reform curricula and enliven student engagement in the subjects There is a growing recognition among educators and policy makers that the learning of science must dovetail with learning about science; this handbook is uniquely positioned as a locus for the discussion. -/- The handbook features sections on pedagogical, theoretical, national, and biographical research, setting the literature of each tradition in its historical context. Each chapter engages in an assessment of the strengths and weakness of the research addressed, and suggests potentially fruitful avenues of future research. A key element of the handbook’s broader analytical framework is its identification and examination of unnoticed philosophical assumptions in science and mathematics research. It reminds readers at a crucial juncture that there has been a long and rich tradition of historical and philosophical engagements with science and mathematics teaching, and that lessons can be learnt from these engagements for the resolution of current theoretical, curricular and pedagogical questions that face teachers and administrators. (shrink)

Research in science education has recognized the importance of history and philosophy of science (HPS), and this has facilitated the evaluation of science textbooks. Purpose of this chapter is to review research based on analyses of science textbooks that explicitly use a history and philosophy of science framework. This review has focused on studies published in the 15-year period (1996–2010) and has drawn on the following major science education journals: International Journal of Science Education, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, (...) Science Education, and Science & Education. Based on HPS-related criteria, 52 articles were selected for review, and of these 28 were published in Science & Education, which clearly shows the importance of HPS for this journal. Selected articles were classified in the following subject areas depending on the textbooks analyzed: university biology textbooks (n = 2), university chemistry textbooks (n = 14), university physics textbooks (n = 17), and primary, secondary, and high school textbooks (n = 19). Results obtained revealed the following: (a) Most biology, chemistry, physics, and school science textbooks lack a history and philosophy of science perspective; (b) most of the textbooks analyzed were published in the USA and to a much lesser extent in other countries; (c) few studies provided details of the procedure and reliability of the application of criteria/rubric for analyzing textbooks; (d) some of the topics analyzed in the textbooks were nature of science, atomic structure, Newtonian mechanics, quantum mechanics, special theory of relativity, and evolution; (e) textbooks avoided including controversial and difficult aspects of different topics (e.g., concepts of force, weight, heat, temperature, origin of the quantum hypothesis, oil drop experiment, Millikan’s data supported Einstein’s photoelectric equation but not his theory); and (f) various science topics provide an opportunity to illustrate the tentative nature of scientific knowledge, and still very few textbooks referred to this important aspect. As textbooks do refer to laws and theories while referring to historical content, it is concluded that HPS is already “inside” the science curriculum provided textbook authors make an effort to scrutinize the historical reconstructions while dealing with the different topics. (shrink)

Historians of science have treated the history of primary, secondary, tertiary, and popular science education, although overall the collective scholarship on these issues remains sparse in comparison to other topics in the history of science. Guided at first by the conceptual frameworks of Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault, this literature has moved beyond them to embrace a broader methodological pluralism. This essay examines areas where the scholarship on the history of science education is most developed: the history of tertiary science (...) education and of pedagogical practices in professional settings. Here historians of science have focused mainly on scientific textbooks; science pedagogy, or how science is taught and learned; pedagogical practices in generational reproduction; and finally the political, social, and economic dimensions of science education. The essay concludes by considering how an emerging area of general historical scholarship, the history of the senses, offers an opportunity to add a new dimension to the history of science education. (shrink)