It is widely argued that Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (NST) is going to affect several aspects of our life. Therefore, students need to develop their nanoliteracy to cope with the everyday issues related to NST. Although there is an increasing interest in introducing NST content to primary school students, the theoretical frameworks for…

Background: It is stated that it is necessary that students develop their nanoliteracy in order to come up with everyday issues arising from Nanoscale Science and Technology (NST) applications, taking informed decisions and estimating the potential risks and benefits. Even though the inclusion of NST in compulsory education is supported by many…

Introducing Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (NST) topics into school science curricula is considered useful for an in-depth understanding of the content, processes and nature of science and technology, and also for negotiating the social aspects of science. This study examines (a) the development of an inquiry-based Teaching-Learning Sequence (TLS)…

This case study focuses on teachers' professional development in NanoScience and nanoTechnology (NST). In the context of a Community of Learners (CoL), in-service teachers in collaboration with science education researchers, nanoscience researchers and experts from science museums, developed a teaching module. This module integrates NST topics…

We present two studies that investigated the adoption of visual/spatial and analytic strategies by individuals at different levels of expertise in the area of organic chemistry, using the Visual Analytic Chemistry Task (VACT). The VACT allows the direct detection of analytic strategy use without drawing inferences about underlying mental…

Science education research has revealed a number of student mental models for atomic structure, among which, the one based on Bohr's model seems to be the most dominant. The aim of the current study is to investigate the coherence of these models when students apply them for the explanation of a variety of situations. For this purpose, a set of…

Previous research has reported that students commonly develop alternative conceptions in the core topic of chemical bonding. Research in England has reported that students there commonly demonstrate an alternative "molecular" conceptual framework for thinking about ionic bonding: in terms of the formation of molecule-like ions pairs…

The current study aims to investigate students' representations of the atomic structure in a number of student cohorts with specific characteristics concerning age, grade, class curriculum and some individual differences, such as formal reasoning and field dependence/independence. Two specific task contexts, which were designed in accordance with…

One way of checking to what extent instructional textbooks achieve their aim is to evaluate the questions they contain. In this work, we analyze the questions that are included in the chapters on chemical bonding of ten general chemistry textbooks. We study separately the questions on intra- and on intermolecular bonding, with the former…

This work uses the concepts and tools of complexity theory to examine the effect of logical thinking and two cognitive styles, such as, the degree of field dependence/independence and the convergent/divergent thinking on students' understanding of the structure of matter. Students were categorized according to the model they adopted for the…

As research shows that the knowledge and use of models and modelling by teachers is limited, particularly for predicting phenomena, we developed and applied a sequence of three representations of a simulated model focusing on polarization and specifically showing the behaviour of an atom, and forces exerted on a dipole and an insulator, when a…

This study tested for deep understanding and critical thinking about basic quantum chemical concepts taught at 12th grade (age 17-18). Our aim was to achieve conceptual change in students. A quantitative study was conducted first (n = 125), and following this 23 selected students took part in semi-structured interviews either individually or in…