The purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between high school students' understandings of aspects about nature of science (NOS) and their argumentation skills, particularly whether informed conceptions of NOS contribute to better argumentation skills. Participants, a total of 125 Grade 10 students, responded to an open-ended…

Background/Context: Historical studies of this volatile period in educational history (1960-2003 tend to focus on educational policy and/or curriculum, but rarely address changes in learning theory. Numerous historical studies have traced how psychologists, psychometricians, policymakers, and social scientists have dismissed the intellectual…

Teachers' decision-making about resource selection is made more complex when resources are appraised for their potential to raise controversial issues or cause offence to others within school communities. Debates around the use of trigger warnings, freedom of speech and the impact of exclusionary practices further complicate these processes. In…

School communities across the United States are experiencing increasing calls to remove the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) from their curricula despite not actually doing so in practice. This anti-CRT push is part of a larger, conservative agenda to ban teaching "divisive" topics in public schools and exemplifies the underlying…

Many researchers have suggested that incorporating history and philosophy of science in the science curriculum can be helpful for students' understanding of scientific concepts and effective for developing their scientific thinking. Recently, in this context, there have been studies on historical controversies which show that history of science…

Entropy is a concept with an extreme controversy which many scientists have been trying to explain. Some of the approaches employed in its definition contradict each other, which made it extremely difficult for high school and college students to understand. Boltzmann was the first person who brought a statistical explanation to entropy and…

This review explores Thomas Lessl's "Demarcation as a classroom response to creationism: A critical examination of the National Academy of Science's "Science, Evolution, and Creationism" (2008)." Lessl's work examines philosophical debates about the relationship between science and religion from the perspective of communication…

This study examined the learning trajectory of five US humanities teachers when navigating learning to teach the difficult history of school desegregation within a context of a six-month inquiry-based professional development. The research questions were: What do teachers frame as problems when teaching difficult histories? How do they…

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on school education resulted in class disruption and fragmented online teaching. Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) was made compulsory in England in 2020, but the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on RSE is unclear. In this study, 16 teachers working in English secondary schools participated in online…

Today's political environment continues to become more polarized as Americans find themselves taking sides on controversial issues. While this is certainly not new to the American democratic experience, the way we as a country are combating it is. With the nation engulfed in a political maelstrom, people are forgetting how to have a civilized…

These student-led, co-curricular programs are designed to give honors students the opportunity to learn and practice civil discourse through difficult conversations. Issues such as race, religion, politics, gender, and sexual orientation are carefully curated to help students practice and hone their dialogue skills outside the classroom where…

This paper provides insight into parental attitudes to their primary-aged children learning about the Holocaust. Evidence is based on data from interviews with parents whose children learned about the Holocaust in their last year of primary. Findings show that parents had initial concerns about their children learning about the Holocaust, but that…

As a science teacher and youth minister from a predominantly white evangelical community in rural Appalachia, I have had many opportunities to teach the science of global warming to climate change deniers. In this manuscript, I share some of the lessons I have learned to make my presentations less contentious and help those I teach be more…

This article examines uniform standardized history education in Russia. It focuses primarily on the process of designing unified national history textbooks in 2013-2017, and also examines the educational reform that followed this process, along with the role of Russian society in the formulation of the textbook's content. The new…

A founding purpose of public education is to adequately prepare children for thoughtful self-government, citizenship, and independent adult life. This end is served by having educators teach students not what to think about controversial or contested public matters but how to think such issues through. When educators fail in this essential duty,…