The National Science Education Standards emphasize a goal that students should achieve scientific literacy, which is defined as the knowledge and understanding of scientific concepts needed in daily living. Scientific literacy enables people to not only use scientific principles and processes in making personal decisions but also to participate in…

The colour of the copper layer deposited on a graphite electrode during electrolysis of an aqueous solution of copper(II) sulfate looks whitish-grey when inspected in situ. Taking the electrode out of the solution reveals the familiar orange-red colour of deposited copper. The explanation is found in terms of the almost ideal complementary colours…

In an online graduate paleontology course taken by practicing Earth Science teachers, we designed an investigation using teachers' local informal educational environments. Teachers (N = 28) were responsible for photographing, describing, and integrating fossil specimens from two informal sites into a paleoenvironmental analysis of the landscape in…

Teaching the connectedness of relationships among elements in the Periodic Table is often an overwhelming task, and can result in shallow student understanding. This article contains a series of activities that evoke student prior knowledge about classification, leads them to discover periodicity and other relationships among the characteristics…

Our main goal in this study was to explore whether the use of models in high school molecular genetics instruction can contribute to students' understanding of concepts and processes in genetics. Three hundred and nineteen students from four comparable groups of 11th- and 12th-grade students participated. The control group (116 students) was…

This article discusses the role of imagination in science education. It provides a justification for imaginative thinking in the context of school science, as well as some strategies that can be implemented by science teachers in their classrooms.

This study proposes an empirical classification of ways to introduce elements of the history of science into science teaching, as well as describing a special way to do so characterized by the introduction of short extracts from historical texts. The aim is to motivate students to participate in problem-solving activities and to transform their…

Oscillating chemical reactions are truly spectacular phenomena, and demonstrations are always appreciated by the class. However, explaining such reactions to high school or first-year university students is problematic, because it may seem that no acceptable explanation is possible unless the students have profound knowledge of both physical…