Textbooks and encyclopedias represent different genres of scientific literature. Textbooks help the students to prepare for their examinations in various subjects taught at schools, such as logic, metaphysic, chemistry. In the 17th Century some Calvinist professors, mostly in Germany, thought that a universal wholeness should be taught for the…

The process of translation has been studied extensively from a philological point of view, and has been lately regarded as a creative activity, during which the translated text is not treated in isolation from the circumstances of its reception. Current research has related communicational and functional approaches with concepts such as…

Peter I's editorial policy appears as a starting point in the birth of secular Russian textbooks. Since the printing production was then organized on a massive scale as a response to the needs of European-like modernization, it should be safely suggested that nearly "all" books produced during this pioneering period focused teaching objectives. To…

Experiments with the simple pendulum are easy, but its motion is nevertheless confounded with simple harmonic motion. However, refined theoretical models of the pendulum can, today, be easily taught using software like CALCODE. Similarly, the cycloidal pendulum is isochronous only in simplified theory. But what "are" theoretically equal intervals…

Historical studies of science pedagogy have flourished in recent years. This essay offers an assessment of the literature on science pedagogy from the 1930s to the present. It argues that rather than focusing on the work of Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault, historians of science pedagogy could with profit turn to the work of Ludwik Fleck. Fleck…

Kuhn underlined the relevance of Galileo's gestalt switch in the interpretation of a swinging body from constrained fall to time metre. But the new interpretation did not eliminate the older one. The constrained fall, both in the motion of pendulums and along inclined planes, led Galileo to the law of free fall. Experimenting with physical…

Newton's Cradle is a series of bifilar pendulums used in physics classrooms to demonstrate the role of the principles of conservation of momentum and kinetic energy in elastic collisions. The paper reviews the way in which textbooks use Newton's Cradle and points out the unsatisfactory nature of these treatments in almost all cases. The literature…

Much attention has been given to Newton's argument for Universal Gravitation in Book III of the "Principia". Newton brings an impressive array of phenomena, along with the three laws of motion, and his rules for reasoning to deduce Universal Gravitation. At the centre of this argument is the famous "moon test". Here it is the empirical evidence…

The purpose of the present study was to test the hypothesis that student's abductive reasoning skills play an important role in the generation of hypotheses on pendulum motion tasks. To test the hypothesis, a hypothesis-generating test on pendulum motion, and a prior-belief test about pendulum motion were developed and administered to a sample of…

Physicists have known for some time that pendulum motion is a useful analogy for other physical processes. Chemists have played with the idea from time to time but the strength of the analogy between pendulum motion and chemical processes has only received prominent published recognition since about 1980, although there are details of the analogy…

One of the most important topics on the international agenda in educational research is to gain an understanding of the processes of educational change in teachers and of the factors that favour or hinder it. Such understanding is, for instance, an essential element in planning and putting into practice initial and ongoing teacher education…

This study considers the relationship between science, science teaching and the philosophy of science perceiving these three cultural phenomena as a semantic triad. This approach presents science teaching as being a form of a scientific reflection. The relationship of science teaching to the philosophy of science is advocated to be essential,…

Despite its frequent use, there is little understanding of the concept of differential among upper high school and undergraduate students of physics. As a first step to identify the origin of this situation and to revert it, we have done a historic and epistemological study aimed at clarifying the role and the meaning of the differential in…

Much has been written about how effective nature of science instruction must have a significant explicit and reflective character. However, while explicitly drawing students' attention to NOS issues is crucial, learning and teaching the NOS are essentially matters of conceptual change. In this article, how people learn and learners' responses to…

This study implemented eye-tracking technology to understand the impact of different multimedia instructional materials, i.e., five successive pages versus a single page with the same amount of information, on information-processing activities in 21 non-science-major college students. The findings showed that students demonstrated the same number…