Secondary science education plays a key role in students' process to become scientifically literate citizens. However, teaching students to acquire the necessary skills and knowledge to deal with complex societal issues is challenging. This paper reports about a study in which Scrum -- a methodology to manage complex projects -- was implemented in…

Sustainability has become a prominent theme in society and can be considered as an integral part of scientific citizenship. This study investigates to what extent the production, use and re-use of (bio)plastics initiates students' reasoning and to identify the kind of content knowledge students put forward. The structure of students' arguments was…

Ensuring the quality of investigations requires the understanding of procedures by which empirical evidence is obtained. This can be interpreted as becoming aware of and using criteria for evidence in one's mental structure. The question is whether this process can be observed in practice. In two schools for pre-university education where 11th…

In science education, students should come to understand the nature and significance of models. In the case of chemistry education it is argued that the present use of models is often not meaningful from the students' perspective. A strategy to overcome this problem is to use an authentic chemical modelling practice as a context for a curriculum…

Worldwide, a tendency is visible in which upper secondary science curricula are innovated in the direction of context-based education. Crucial to these innovations is the way teachers interact with newly developed teaching materials and implement them in classroom practice. The focus of our research is to identify characteristics of the…

In the framework of a curriculum reform in the Netherlands, an interdisciplinary open inquiry assignment has been introduced as a part of the final secondary school examinations. We developed and evaluated a preparatory open inquiry assignment to be used in science and mathematics departments of schools, in collaboration with each other: the…