Carl Erich Correns (1864-1933) is remembered in the annals of science as one of the three botanists who re-discovered Mendel's laws. He can also, however, be regarded as one of the founding figures of classical genetics in Germany. Between 1894 and 1899 he carried out the crossing experiments with corn and peas that led to the re-statement of…

The demise of Soviet genetics in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s has stood for many as a prime example of the damage that social and political dogmatism can do when allowed to meddle in the workings of science. In particular, the story of Trofim Lysenko's rise to preeminence and the fall of Mendelian genetics in the Soviet Union has become a lasting…

Eleven years before the "rediscovery" in 1900 of Mendel's work, Hugo De Vries published his theory of heredity. He expected his theory to become a big success, but it was not well-received. To find supporting evidence for this theory De Vries started an extensive research program. Because of the parallels of his ideas with the…

Science textbooks and classes mostly emphasize what are considered by today's standards the "right" or "correct" interpretations of particular phenomena or processes. When "incorrect" ideas of the past are mentioned at all, it is simply to point out their errors, with little attention as to why the ideas were put…

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 histories of twentieth-century Darwinism few developments loom larger than the turn-of-the-century rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's genetic research and the later application of Mendelian principles in constructing so-called Neo-Darwinism. Virtually unknown is the equally enthusiastic embrace of Mendel by antievolutionists, who as early as…

Mendel is an icon in the history of genetics and part of our common culture and modern biology instruction. The aim of this paper is to summarize the place of Mendel in the modern biology classroom. In the present article we will identify key issues that make Mendel relevant in the classroom today. First, we recount some of the historical…

This historical narrative describes the foundation of education as established by J. A. Comenius (1592-1670). It explores the transfer of Comenius' tenets, utilized and modified through the years, up to their impact upon the ground-breaking experiments of G. Mendel (1822-1884), "the father of genetics". It explores the questions of…

The purpose of this study was to analyze seven widely used high school biology textbooks in order to assess the nature of science knowledge (NOS) and scientific inquiry (SI) aspects they, explicitly or implicitly, conveyed in the Mendelian genetics sections. Textbook excerpts that directly and/or fully matched our statements about NOS and SI were…

The aim of this study is to advance current understanding of the transactional processes that characterize students' sense-making practices when they are confronted with multiple representations of scientific phenomena. Data for the study are derived from a design experiment that involves a technology-rich, inquiry-based sequence of…

This paper is concerned with the conceptualization of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for teaching about the nature of science. In contrast to the view that science teachers need to develop a specific "PCK for nature of science," an alternative, more comprehensive notion of PCK for science teaching is suggested. The point of…

We teach a course for elementary education undergraduates that gives students an opportunity to conduct open-ended scientific inquiry and pursue their own scientific questions in much the same way that practicing research scientists do. In this study, we compared what our students say declaratively about the nature of science (NOS) in surveys and…

That nature and the universe are ordered, uniform, and comprehensible is a starting point in science. However, such worldview presuppositions are often taken for granted, rather than explicitly mentioned, in science and in science class. This article takes a worldview perspective and reports from interviews (N = 26) with upper secondary students…

Successful implementation of historical approach to teach nature of science (NOS) requires suitable curriculum material. Several research and development projects have produced lesson plans for science teachers. 25 lesson plans from four different projects involved in creating curriculum material utilizing historical approach in chemistry…

This study examined and compared students' understanding of nature of science (NOS) with 521 Grade 8 Canadian and Korean students using a mixed methods approach. The concepts of NOS were measured using a survey that had both quantitative and qualitative elements. Descriptive statistics and one-way multivariate analysis of variances examined…