The paper reports about the outcome of a systematic review of research on family resemblance approach (FRA) to nature of science in (NOS) science education. FRA is a relatively recent perspective on NOS being a system of cognitive-epistemic and social-institutional aspects of science. FRA thus consists of a set of categories such as aims and…

There is substantial research in science education about students', teachers', and scientists' views of nature of science (NOS). Many studies have used NOS frameworks that focus on particular ideas such as tentativeness of scientific knowledge and cultural embeddedness of science. In this paper, we investigate NOS from the perspective of the…

The goal of this study was to examine the way preservice science teachers depict and develop their understanding of nature of science (NOS), from the perspective of the family resemblance approach (FRA). FRA defines NOS as a Cognitive-Epistemic and Social-Institutional system. Appling the dual-analytic approach via reflective drawing analysis, we…

Understanding the nature of science (NOS) has emerged as a core curricular goal since at least the 1960s. While science education reforms around the world have shed light on various epistemic and social underpinnings of science, how science curriculum documents portray the nature of other related disciplines such as mathematics and engineering has…

The article focuses on the analysis of curriculum documents from Taiwan to investigate how benchmarks for learning nature of science (NOS) are positioned in different versions of the science curricula. Following a review of different approaches to the conceptualization of NOS and the role of NOS in promoting scientific literacy, an empirical study…

The purpose of this commentary on Hodson and Wong's (2017, this issue) article is to clarify the merits of the expanded family resemblance approach (FRA) to science education, briefly alluded to in their article, and to discuss the implications of this approach relative to the question of demarcation they raise. In clarifying the merits of the…

In this paper, we trace the work of some philosophers of chemistry to draw some implications for the improvement of chemical education. We examine some key features of chemical knowledge, and how these features are relevant for school chemistry teaching and learning. In particular, we examine Laszlo's ("Foundations of Chemistry"…

In this paper, I argue that contemporary accounts of nature of science (NoS) are limited in their depiction of "science" and that new perspectives are needed to broaden their characterisation and appeal for science education. In particular, I refer to the role of interdisciplinary characterisations of science in informing the theory and…

Background: The use of visual representations (i.e., photographs, diagrams, models) has been part of science, and their use makes it possible for scientists to interact with and represent complex phenomena, not observable in other ways. Despite a wealth of research in science education on visual representations, the emphasis of such research has…

History and philosophy of science have been widely promoted in science teacher education for several decades. However the application of themes from philosophy of science in science teacher education has been rather broad and not particular relative to the domain-specific features of the science in question. The purpose of this paper is to…

This paper reports on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework for the characterization of models and modeling that can be useful in application to chemistry education. The underlying argument marks a departure from an emphasis on concepts that are the outcomes of chemical inquiry about how knowledge growth occurs through modeling in chemistry.…