Old physics textbooks give us a great opportunity to learn about the history of science and rediscover different methods to teach physics to our students. There are many disused and forgotten experiments in them, but these can still be very useful to affirm and understand physics. This is the case of an instrument used in the 19th century to…

This study evaluates the experimental tasks of the Ethiopian grade 12 chemistry textbook vis-à-vis coverage of the essential components of science process skills (SPSs) using content analysis. All the procedures in an experiment were analyzed using rubrics of the inquiry-based task analysis inventory (ITAI) instrument. This instrument was based on…

In 1752, the American polymath Benjamin Franklin supposedly flew a kite near the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to confirm that lightning had the same properties of common electricity that electrical machines produced and Leyden jars served to store. Illustrations, vignettes and paintings frequently portray the famous experiment, showing…

In a chemistry course for students not majoring in science, there is more to learn than some memorized facts: the student can find, in most non-major chemistry texts, the definition of atomic number, something about chemical bonding, and names of some classes of chemical compounds. Where facts come from and how accurately they are known are often…

The topic of chemistry safety was included at the margins of traditional chemistry education in China. In order to understand the concerns of the safety issues based on the new chemistry curriculum in the mainland China secondary school, this study analyzed old and new secondary chemistry curriculum standards via the Natural Language Processing…

A number of scholars have shown the prevalence of multiple metaphors in biological conceptions of the living cell. However, there is little research into unpacking these metaphors to understand their ideological implications for scientific knowledge and science education. In this paper, I perform a critical discourse analysis of the representation…

This study aimed to examine teachers' satisfaction with and needs for earth science model experiments science textbooks used in primary schools. To this end, 103 primary school teachers participated in an online survey, and five teachers with doctorates in science education theory were interviewed. The findings of the study were as follows. First,…

This exploratory study aims to verify whether the current use of scientific experiments in the Moroccan high-school science curriculum meets students' needs for experimental scientific learning. For that purpose, a sample chapter of the official science textbook was analysed in detail. The analysis was carried out using a didactic model of the…

Thermodynamics education is not easy both for students and teachers. But the Entropy, Chemical potential, Real gas structure, Fugacity, Molecular interaction, Supercritical phenomena chapters become more comprehensible, if introduced via the pure real gases' cluster physics chapter. A pure gas consists of the only one type of basic particles,…

Ask a physics person what the name of Robert A. Millikan brings to mind, and most would immediately think of the eponymous experiments that he did with the charge on the electron in the years 1908 to 1913. A few might remember his work, starting in 1914, with the experimental determination of Planck's constant using the photoelectric effect. Few…

Many physics textbooks describe the way in which a capacitor in an RC circuit charges and discharges over time. A circuit that consists of a capacitor that is connected to a voltage divider as shown in Fig. 1 is commonly addressed, but the textbooks limit the discussion to the time immediately after the switch is closed and a long time after the…

Matter is an essential science topic that is often challenging to teach at the early elementary levels. Learning about matter helps students develop a solid foundation for more complex concepts that are taught in later years. Make this abstract concept developmentally appropriate for children by engaging them in investigations that focus on…

The so-called "Rutherford's experiment," as it is outlined in many physics textbooks, is a case in point of the flaws around the history at the educational level of one of the decisive event of modern physics: the discovery that the atom has a nucleus. This paper shows that this alleged experiment is a very approximate and very partial…

Physics textbook authors commonly introduce the concept of weightlessness (apparent or real) through a "thought experiment" in which a person weighs herself or himself in an elevator. When the elevator falls freely, the spring balance should show zero weight. There is an unresolved controversy about how this "zero reading"…

A recent textbook research, carried out on a sample of 20 American physics textbooks, shows that the authors mainly keep the old definition of weight. According to that definition, the weight of a body is the gravitational force on the body. In such a conceptual frame, the objects in the spaceship are "apparently weightless" because they…