Promoting a functional scientific literacy entails preparing people to effectively engage and make decisions regarding real-world socioscientfic issues (SSI) through consideration of the relevant products and processes of science, as well as social, cultural, environmental, and ethical factors. Students can develop a functional scientific literacy…

The purpose of this study is to examine how and in what ways the dimensions of the nature of science are included in the 6th, 7th, and 8th grade science textbooks taught between 1926 and 2018 and to determine how these dimensions are represented in textbooks based on curricula shifts. In this study, a total of 24 textbooks allowed by the Ministry…

Changing where, when, and how objects are studied is central to lab-based science (Knorr Cetina, 1999). Science involves changing the scale of objects--particularly scales of size, time, and intensity--from what is experienced in the world. Similar to investigations conducted in science laboratories, classroom investigations involve…

Understanding how and why science works is a major goal of science education. The aim of this article is to analyze the influence of a research experience in real science contexts, in the thinking and practice of preservice elementary teachers regarding inquiry and nature of science teaching. An in-depth case study which highlights the affordances…

Current visions of science education advocate that students should engage with science in the classroom in ways that mirror the work of scientists in order to develop science proficiency. For this goal, teachers are tasked with the complex responsibility of supporting students in understanding not only the conceptual knowledge of science, but also…

Inspired by a theoretical view of knowledge as a resource, this study explored in detail how a student used knowledge as a resource when she engaged in problem-solving about rocks and what she learned as a result of the practice of solving scientific problems. The context of the study was an inquiry project conducted in an earth science course for…

This study explored Indonesian prospective teachers' views on the adapted (including global socio-scientific issues) and revisited (including local socio-scientific issues) versions of the scientific habits of mind (SHOM) scale and compared their SHOM levels concerning teacher education programs and grades. The sample of the study consisted of…

The purpose of this study is twofold: first, to delve into professional development (PD) of science teachers' views about nature of science (NOS) throughout activities linking NOS aspects to science centers (SCs), and second, to reveal how a science teacher uses NOS aspects while teaching in SCs. An instrumental qualitative case study method with…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the features of modeling-based abductive reasoning as a disciplinary practice of inquiry in the domain of earth science. The study was based on an undergraduate course of a university of education, Korea, offered for preservice elementary teachers majoring in science as their specialty. The course…

How do different components of a learning environment contribute to learning in science? The study examines the contribution of laboratory experiments and computer model explorations to the learning of chemistry through a complex-systems approach. Specifically, junior high-school students' learning of chemistry via four different methods were…

The nature of science (NOS) is a primary goal in school science. Most teachers are not well-prepared for teaching NOS, but a sophisticated and in-depth understanding of NOS is necessary for effective teaching. Some authors emphasize the need for teaching NOS in context. Species, a central concept in biology, is proposed in this article as a…

The demarcation problem as one of the most prominent topics in the philosophy of science deserves a higher profile in science education literature as a part of the discussions about the instruction of the nature of science (NOS) concepts to generate a scientifically literate society. In this qualitative survey research study, the views of the…

Our goal in this article is to provide research-based strategies for embedding Nature of Science (NOS) into science instruction at the elementary level. We thus intend to aid researchers, professional developers, and teachers in noting that not only is it important and possible to teach NOS at the elementary levels, but also that elementary…

There is widespread agreement that an adequate understanding of the nature of science (NOS) is a critical component of scientific literacy and a major goal in science education. However, we still do not know many specific details regarding how students and teachers learn particular aspects of NOS and what are the most important feature traits of…

Erduran and Dagher's (2014) account of the Family Resemblance Approach (FRA) to Nature of Science (NOS) is a relatively new framework that frames NOS in a holistic fashion, inclusive of cognitive-epistemic and social-institutional aspects. This approach has also been referred to as the "Reconceptualized Family Resemblance Approach to Nature…