Many science educators have argued in favour of including socioscientific issues (SSI) in general, and ethical issues in particular, in school science. However, there have been a number of objections to this proposal, and it is widely acknowledged that such teaching places additional demands on science teachers. This study examined the curricula,…

Despite its positive impact on students' understanding of the nature of science and science content knowledge, few secondary science teachers incorporate the history of science into their instruction. This article describes the effects of an online history of science course on preservice teachers' perceptions of and content and pedagogical…

Seeking a historical-philosophical approach to science teaching, narrative texts have been used as pedagogical tools to improve the learning experience of students. A review of the literature of different types of narrative texts and their different rates of effectiveness in science education is presented. This study was developed using the…

The purpose of this study was to analyze seven widely used high school biology textbooks in order to assess the nature of science knowledge (NOS) and scientific inquiry (SI) aspects they, explicitly or implicitly, conveyed in the Mendelian genetics sections. Textbook excerpts that directly and/or fully matched our statements about NOS and SI were…

Studies in the history of science and education have documented that the reception and understanding of evolutionary theory is highly contingent on local factors such as school systems, cultural traditions, religious beliefs, and language. This has important implications for teaching evolution in primary and secondary schools. No universal…

Various studies have promoted instruction in the history and philosophy of science (HPS) in science classes, but the best way of putting this perspective into practice remains undetermined. To contribute to this issue, we developed a pedagogical project in some high schools in Brazil that aimed to present science content using an…

Between 1880 and 1920 the way science was taught in American High Schools changed dramatically. The old "lecture/demonstration" method, where information was presented to essentially passive students, was replaced by the "laboratory" method, where students performed their own experiments in specially constructed student laboratories. National…

In this paper we present a schematic overview of the central concepts in evolutionary theory, setting them off against the background of widespread misconceptions about them. Our aim is to provide high school teachers with (1) an overview of those particular concepts that they can expect students to have difficulties with, (2) a comparison of…

This work investigates the presence of Thought Experiments (TEs) which refer to the theory of relativity and to quantum mechanics in physics textbooks and in books popularizing physics theories. A further point of investigation is whether TEs--as presented in popular physics books--can be used as an introduction to familiarize secondary school…