This empirical study investigates factors that influence the implementation of science inquiry in the education systems of Turkey, Israel, Sweden and the Czech Republic. Data was collected by means of recordings of science experts' discussions as part of an EU-funded project called Science-Teacher Education Advanced Methods (2009-2012). Results of…

Systematic studies on the effectiveness of in-service teacher professional development (PD) are important for science education research and practice. Previous studies have mostly focused on certain outcomes of PD, for example, the effectiveness of PD for improving teachers' knowledge or students' learning outcomes. This study, however, explores…

One important focus for science education researchers over many years has been the attempts to replace students' commonsense and non-scientific explanations of various phenomena by scientific explanations. The approach we adopted almost three decades ago was conceptual mediation, and this was shown to have a considerable level of success with…

About two decades ago, Donald Stokes published "Pasteur's Quadrant" (Stokes, 1997). Stokes proposed that the motivations of different research projects can be understood as a two-dimensional system, with higher or lower concern for improving technology and practice on one dimension and higher or lower concern for improving fundamental…

Research in genetics and genomics is advancing at a fast pace, and thus keeping up with the most recent findings and conclusions can be very challenging. At the same time these recent findings and conclusions have made necessary a reconceptualization of genes and heredity, both in science and in science education, beyond the mostly gene-centred…

This paper examines shifts in the knowledge production policy agenda at Japanese research universities -- a transition from discipline-based academic tradition towards interdisciplinary forms of knowledge production -- through a case study of a leading interdisciplinary research institute. We examine this transition through the case of Tohoku…

Benefits of incorporating research experiences into laboratory courses have been well documented, yet examples of research projects designed for the first semester introductory organic chemistry lab course are extremely rare. To address this deficiency, a Carbohydrate-Based human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) Inhibitor project consisting of a…

The author contemplates the fate of Russian science in the light of the reforms that are going on today, and the requirements of bringing it into conformity with this country's traditions as well as with international practices. [This article was translated by Kim Braithwaite.]

Despite the importance of scientific inquiry in science education, researchers and educators disagree considerably regarding what features define this instructional approach. While a large body of literature addresses theoretical considerations, numerous empirical studies investigate scientific inquiry on quite different levels of detail and also…

New visuality in art/science pedagogies challenges teachers to rethink their curriculum and the role of digital new media in facilitating conceptual thinking and the role of the creative representation of knowledge. Recent neuroscientific research on cognition, perception, memory, and emotion inform and provoke implications for 21st-century…

Although nature of science (NOS) and nature of scientific inquiry (NOSI) are related to each other, they are differentiated as NOS is being more related to the product of scientific inquiry (SI) which is scientific knowledge whereas NOSI is more related to the process of SI (Schwartz et al. 2008). Lederman et al. ("Journal of Research in…

The National Science Foundation's (NSF) decades-long investment in science and engineering (S&E) research helped build the backbone of the U.S. scientific enterprise and transformed universities and colleges into centers of scientific innovation, creativity, knowledge and discovery. It also brought about the benefits of scientific…

Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin, had wide and varied interests. They ranged from exploration and travel writing to fingerprinting and the weather. After reading Darwin's "On the Origin of Species," Galton reached the conclusion that it should be possible to improve the human stock through selective breeding, as was the…

In this paper, in order to pursue the conversation begun by Fages and Albe ("Cult Stud Sci Educ" 2014), I highlight three conceptual contributions that could be made by familiarizing nanoscience and nanotechnology researchers and engineers with the work being carried out in science and technology studies and public understanding of…

Informal science education is a broad field of research marked by fuzzy boundaries, tensions, and muddles among many disciplines, making for an unclear future trajectory (or trajectories) for the field of study. In this commentary, I unpack some of the hidden dimensions, tensions and challenges the five articles raise or point to implicitly in…