Conversations on the connection of art, beauty, and the aesthetic experience in science are gaining a voice in the science education community. This article provides a conceptual overview of the role of beauty and aesthetics in science and science education. It focuses on a discussion of four themes exploring beauty in scientific ideas and…

Creativity, the ability to produce novel and appropriate work, is one of humanity's most important traits. The concept applies to historic novelty, generating ideas and artefacts that arise for the first time in human history, and to individual novelty; ideas and artefacts new to the person who creates them. Despite its importance, creativity is…

The first section of this article examines a range of definitions of biotechnology. This analysis demonstrates that teachers' choices will determine their view of biotechnology, as positioned along a traditional-modern, axis, and provides examples of the tensions that these differing positions create. A further section argues that in order for…

Many researchers in the field of education aspire to influence what actually happens in schools and classrooms. They entered their profession aware of the need to improve educational practice; many of them want to make a difference. Yet few observers would claim that the results of education research are eagerly awaited by teachers, school…

In this paper, it is suggested that while there are a variety of frames or perspectives that guide research into learning science, a pre-paradigmatic field need not be a "free-for-all". Lakatos suggested that academic research fields were characterised by research programmes (RP), which offered heuristic guidance to researchers, and which…

This article summarises the main uses and affordances (the perceived qualities of systems that can support or hinder interactions: Greeno & MMAP, 1998) of interactive technologies commonly used in school science. Its main emphasis, however, is on eliciting and documenting the emerging strategies that teachers are developing for exploiting the new…

The three major educational sectors in which learning occurs are often taken to be the formal education sector (schools, colleges, universities and so on), the workplace, and the free-choice learning sector (Falk, 2002). This review is concerned with science on television, understood as a significant component of the free-choice learning sector.…

More recent work has complemented earlier studies of the "student voice" in science education by redirecting research attention to focus more directly on what students think about the form, content and purpose of their school science education and exploring the curriculum and pedagogical implications of the findings. Researchers have also explored…

This article argues that an important source of the difficulties posed by particular concepts and theories is the narrow range of "types of causal models" with which most learners are familiar. Most learners are familiar with relatively simple styles of causal models, but many concepts and theories in science depend on styles substantially more…

An enhanced greenhouse effect, leading to global warming and associated changes in the climate system, is arguably one of the greatest environmental challenges facing humankind in the 21st century. The challenge extends to the scientific, political, economic and ethical domains of the human enterprise. The science of climate change involves…

The starting point for this article is the lack of a clear or emerging consensus of what is generally understood by the term "health education", or its role as a component of the school science curriculum which requires a particular research focus. One of the purposes of this article is to explore the concept of health education as one in which a…

The purpose of this paper is to organize and critique the theoretical work done so far on the "relation between the cognitive and the emotional in science learning" and suggest possible directions for research that takes into consideration this relation. In light of the enduring negative effect of much school science on students' emotional…

The purpose of this article is to define, through discussion and example, the notion of an "anthropological approach" to science education research, as well as to advocate the potential contribution of such an approach to several research domains and to questions of access and equity. This paper reviews a variety of research articles that address,…

In this paper, the authors argue that chemical knowledge in the classroom will be enriched by the application of characterizations of models drawn from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. This discussion highlights two important issues relating to chemical knowledge in the classroom: (1) the status of chemical knowledge in the classroom,…

In the last 30 years or so, science educators in the Western world have come to recognise the importance of the social and cultural context in which learning occurs (Cobern, 1993, 1994; Hodson, 1993; Leach & Scott, 2003) and have, through such movements as science, technology, society and the environment (Pedretti, 1997; Solomon, 1991; Solomon &…