An understanding of the scientific enterprise is useful because citizens need to make systematic, rational decisions about projects involving scientific endeavors and technology, and a clearer understanding of scientific epistemology is beneficial because it could encourage more public engagement with science. The purpose of this study was to…

The reasoning belief of "argumentum ad nauseam" assumes that when someone repeats something often enough, he or she becomes more convincing. The present paper analyses the use of this strategy by seventh-grade students in an argumentation task. Sixty-five students (mean age: 12.2, SD?=?0.4) from a public school in a mid-sized urban…

There is a crisis in school science in Australia and this may be related to insufficient students developing an interest in science. This extended study looked at changes in 14 students' interest in science as they moved through junior secondary school into Year 10. Although the majority of these students still had an interest in science in…

There are a wide range of student emotions in academic settings, but apart from emotions such as interest and well-being, disgust is a negative emotion which might be relevant in biology education, for instance, during dissection or when encountering living animals. This paper addresses the issue of situational disgust during a course at the…

The purpose of this study was to (a) investigate the effectiveness of explicit nature of science (NOS) instruction in the context of controversial socioscientific issues and (b) explore whether the transfer of acquired NOS understandings, which were explicitly taught in the context of one socioscientific context, into other similar contexts…

This study investigates the effects of argument stance on knowledge inquiry skills. Sixty-two participants were assigned to three argument stance conditions (proponent, opponent, or control) to receive scaffolded argumentation practice on two science issues in random order. After the argumentation treatment, participants were asked to write down…

Do non-science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students' views about STEM studies correspond with how STEM students actually perceive these studies? This paper deals with this issue by comparing higher education students' attitudes towards STEM studies between those who actually did a STEM study and those who did not.…

Conservation efforts such as the restoration of European bison or the support of wolf immigration into Germany are often socio-scientifically controversial. In many cases, disputes are based on individuals' threat perception and attitudes towards the animal involved. The herewith reported study provides qualitative insights into German…

In this study, questions in context-based and traditional chemistry textbooks were analysed from two perspectives that are at the heart of chemistry curricula reforms: a content perspective and a learning activities perspective. To analyse these textbook questions, we developed an instrument for each perspective. In total, 971 textbook questions…

This study investigates the impact of collaborative reflections on teachers' inquiry teaching practices and identifies supportive actions relating to their professional development. Three science teachers in the same elementary school worked as a cooperative and collaborative group. They attended workshops and worked collaboratively through…

This paper investigates the characteristics of 15-year-old girls who express an intention to study physics post-16. This paper unpacks issues around within-girl group differences and similarities between boys and girls in survey responses about physics. The analysis is based on the year 10 (age 15 years) responses of 5,034 students from 137 UK…

This qualitative, multi-case study explored the use of science-content music for teaching and learning in six middle school science classrooms. The researcher sought to understand how teachers made use of content-rich songs for teaching science, how they impacted student engagement and learning, and what the experiences of these teachers and…

The present study focuses on the way thought experiments (TEs) can be used as didactical tools in teaching physics to upper secondary-level students. A qualitative study was designed to investigate to what extent the TEs called "Einstein's elevator" and "Einstein's train" can function as tools in teaching basic…

Stereotype threat (ST), which involves confirming a negative stereotype about one's group, is a factor thought to contribute to the gender gap in science achievement and participation. This study involved a quasi-experiment in which 312 US high school physics students were randomly assigned, via their classroom cluster, to one of three ST…

This study is an attempt to gain new insight, on behalf of science teachers, into the integration of metacognition (MC) into science education. Participants were 44 elementary school science teachers attending an in-service teacher-training (INST) program. Data collection was carried out by several data sources: recordings of all verbal…