The paper explores the current rationale for primary science in England with a focus on how competing perspectives arising from perceptions of educational ideology and policy discourse have helped to shape current practice. The aim will be to provide a conceptual understanding of this by focusing specifically on how policy has influenced practice. In particular it will consider the way in which discourse and policy text have contributed to the emergent rationale for primary science which in many ways reflects conflicting (...) influences, views and policies. Data were collected over a year from a regional survey and from four case-study primary schools. The findings suggest that teachers in primary schools face tensions between promoting both an educational and a political rationale for learning primary science. The paper will conclude by suggesting that the justification for primary science should be based on what we already know about how children learn science as well as helping them to develop an understanding of science and how it influences and is intrinsically linked to the needs of society. (shrink)

The didactics of astronomy is a relatively young field with respect to that of other sciences. Historical issues have most often been part of the teaching of astronomy, although that often does not stem from a specific didactics. The teaching of astronomy is often subsumed under that of physics. One can easily consider that, from an educational standpoint, astronomy requires the same mathematical or physical strategies. This approach may be adequate in many cases but cannot stand as a general principle (...) for the teaching of astronomy. This chapter offers in a first part a brief overview of the status of astronomy education research and of the role of the history and philosophy of science (HPS) in astronomy education. In a second part, it attempts to illustrate possible ways to structure the teaching of astronomy around its historical development so as to pursue a quality education and contextualized learning. (shrink)

Many degree programs in science and engineering aim at enabling their students to perform interdisciplinary problem solving. In this paper we present three types of expertise that are involved in different ways in interdisciplinary problem solving. In doing so we shall first characterise two important epistemological challenges commonly faced in interdisciplinary problem solving, namely the communication challenge that arises from the use of different concepts within different scientific domains, and the integration challenge that arises from the differences between domain-specific epistemological (...) standards. Next, drawing on recent work on expertise developed within science studies, we characterize the interactional expertise that is a precondition for scientists to communicate across scientific domains, and the integrational expertise that is a precondition for scientists to be able to integrate cognitive resources originating in different domains. Finally, we shall analyse how different types of interdisciplinary problem solving sets different requirements for interactional and integrational expertise and discuss the implications for science and engineering programs in higher education. (shrink)

We present a graduate science ethics course that connects cases from the historical record to present realities and practices in the areas of social responsibility, authorship, and human/animal experimentation. This content is delivered with mixed methods, including films, debates, blogging, and practicum; even the instructional team is mixed, including a historian of science and a research scientist. What really unites all of the course’s components is the experiential aspect: from acting in historical debates to participating in the current scientific enterprise. (...) The course aims to change the students’ culture into one deeply devoted to the science ethics cause. To measure the sought after cultural change, we developed and validated a relevant questionnaire. Results of this questionnaire from students who took the course, demonstrate that the course had the intended effect on them. Furthermore, results of this questionnaire from controls indicate the need for cultural change in that cohort. All these quantitative results are reinforced by qualitative outcomes. (shrink)

Constructivism has been a key referent for research into the learning of science for several decades. There is little doubt that the research into learners’ ideas in science stimulated by the constructivist movement has been voluminous, and a great deal is now known about the way various science topics may commonly be understood by learners of various ages. Despite this significant research effort, there have been serious criticisms of this area of work: in terms of its philosophical underpinning, the validity (...) of its most popular constructs, the limited scope of its focus, and its practical value to science teaching. This paper frames this area of work as a Lakatosian Research Programme (RP), and explores the major criticisms of constructivism from that perspective. It is argued that much of the criticism may be considered as part of the legitimate academic debate expected within any active RP, i.e. arguments about the auxiliary theory making up the ‘protective belt’ of the programme. It is suggested that a shifting focus from constructivism to ‘contingency in learning’ will allow the RP to draw upon a more diverse range of perspectives, each consistent with the existing hard core of the programme, which will provide potentially fruitful directions for future work and ensure the continuity of a progressive RP into learning science. (shrink)

In this paper, domain-specificity is presented as an understudied problem in chemical education. This argument is unpacked by drawing from two bodies of literature: learning of science and epistemology of science, both themes that have cognitive as well as philosophical undertones. The wider context is students’ engagement in scientific inquiry, an important goal for science education and one that has not been well executed in everyday classrooms. The focus on science learning illustrates the role of domain specificity in scientific reasoning. (...) The discussion on epistemology of science presents ideas from the emerging field of philosophy of chemistry to highlight the much neglected area of epistemology in chemical education. Domain-specificity is exemplified in the context of chemical laws, in particular the Periodic Law. The applications of the discussion for chemical education are explored in relation to argumentation, itself an epistemologically grounded discourse pattern in science. The overall implications include the need for reconceptualization of the nature of teaching and learning in chemistry to include more particular epistemological aspects of chemistry. (shrink)

The inclusion of the history and philosophy of science in science teaching is widely accepted, but the actual state of implementation in schools is still poor. This article investigates possible reasons for this discrepancy. The demands science teachers associate with HPS-based teaching play an important role, since these determine teachers’ decisions towards implementing its practices and ideas. We therefore investigate the perceptions of 8 HPS-experienced German middle school physics teachers within and beyond an HPS implementation project. Within focused interviews these (...) teachers describe and evaluate the challenges of planning and conducting HPS-based physics lessons using collaboratively developed HPS teaching materials. The teachers highlight a number of obstacles to the implementation of HPS specific to this approach: finding and adapting HPS teaching material, knowing and using instructional design principles for HPS lessons, presenting history in a motivating way, dealing with students’ problematic ideas about the history of science, conducting open-ended historical classroom investigations in the light of known historical outcomes, using historical investigations to teach modern science concepts, designing assessments to target HPS-specific learning outcomes, and justifying the HPS-approach against curriculum and colleagues. Teachers' perceived demands point out critical aspects of pedagogical content knowledge necessary for confident, comfortable and effective teaching of HPS-based science. They also indicate how HPS teacher education and the design of curricular materials can be improved to make implementing HPS into everyday teaching less demanding. (shrink)

The influence of the evolutionary theory is widespread in modern worldview. Due to its great explanatory power and pervasiveness, the theory of evolution should be used as the organizing theme in biology teaching. For this purpose, the essential concepts of phylogenetic systematics are useful as a didactic instrument. The phylogenetic method was the first objective set of rules to implement in systematics the evolutionary view that the organisms are all connected at some hierarchical level due to common ancestry, as suggested (...) by Darwin and Wallace. Phylogenetic systematics was firstly proposed by the German Entomologist Willi Hennig in 1950 and had considerably importance in the decrease of the role of essentialism and subjectivity in classificatory studies, becoming one of the paradigms in biological systematics. Based on cladograms, a general phylogenetic reference system allows to the depiction and representation of large amounts of biological information in branching diagrams. Besides, the phylogenetic approach sheds light upon typical misconceptions concerning evolution and related concepts that directly affect students' comprehension about the evolutionary process and the hierarchical structure of the living world. The phylogenetic method is also a form of introducing students to some of the philosophical and scientific idiosyncrasies, providing them the ability to understand concepts such as hypothesis, theory, paradigm and falsifiability. The students are incited to use arguments during the process of accepting or denying scientific hypotheses, which overcomes the mere assimilation of knowledge previously elaborated. (shrink)