Although the goal of developing school students' understanding of nature of science (NOS) has long been advocated, there is still a lack of research that focuses on probing how science teachers, a kind of major stakeholder in NOS instruction, perceive the values of teaching NOS. Through semi-structured interviews, this study investigated the views…

This study deals with the school instruction of the concept of weight. The historical review reveals the major steps in changing weight definition reflecting the epistemological changes in physics. The latest change drawing on the operation of "weighing" has been not widely copied into physics education. We compared the older instruction…

Science lessons using inquiry only or history of science with inquiry were used for explicit reflective nature of science (NOS) instruction for second-, third-, and fourth-grade students randomly assigned to receive one of the treatments. Students in both groups improved in their understanding of creative NOS, tentative NOS, empirical NOS, and…

Nature of science (NOS) has for a long time been regarded as a key component in science teaching. Much research has focused on students' and teachers' views of NOS, while less attention has been paid to teachers' perspectives on NOS teaching. This article focuses on in-service science teachers' ways of talking about NOS and NOS teaching, e.g. what…

Educators advocate that science education can help the development of more responsible worldviews when students learn not only scientific concepts, but also about science, or "nature of science". Cosmology can help the formation of worldviews because this topic is embedded in socio-cultural and religious issues. Indeed, during the Cold…

This article describes the effect of a teaching-learning sequence (TLS) based on the discovery of oxygen in promoting students' argumentation. It examines the written and oral arguments produced by 63 high school students (24 females and 39 males, 16-17 years old) in France during a complete TLS supervised by the same teacher. The data used in…

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…

One of the main problems in trying to understand quantum physics is the nature of the referent of quantum theory. This point is addressed in the official French curriculum in upper secondary school. Starting in 2012, after about 20 years of absence, quantum physics has returned to the national program. On the basis of the historical construction…

This paper examines physics and mathematics textbooks published in France at the end of the 1950s and at the beginning of the 1960s for children aged 11-15 years old. It argues that at this "middle school" level, textbooks contributed to shape cultural representations of both disciplines and their mutual boundaries through their contents…

This article discusses the role of mathematics during physics lessons in upper-secondary school. Mathematics is an inherent part of theoretical models in physics and makes powerful predictions of natural phenomena possible. Ability to use both theoretical models and mathematics is central in physics. This paper takes as a starting point that the…

We study the interconnection between Physics and Mathematics in concrete instances, departing from the usual expression for the Coulomb electric field, produced by a point-like charge. It is scrutinized by means of six epistemology-intensive questions and radical answers are proposed, intended to widen one's understanding of the subject. Our…

The language of physics is mathematics, and physics ideas, laws and models describing phenomena are usually represented in mathematical form. Therefore, an understanding of how to navigate between phenomena and the models representing them in mathematical form is important for a physics teacher so that the teacher can make physics understandable…

In order to show how formal analogies between different physical systems play an important conceptual work in physics, this paper analyzes the evolution of Einstein's thoughts on the structure of radiation from the point of view of the formal analogies he used as "lenses" to "see" through the "black box" of Planck's…

In physics education, equations are commonly seen as calculation tools to solve problems or as concise descriptions of experimental regularities. In physical science, however, equations often play a much more important role associated with the formulation of theories to provide explanations for physical phenomena. In order to overcome this…

In this paper, we discuss the history of the concept of function and emphasize in particular how problems in physics have led to essential changes in its definition and application in mathematical practices. Euler defined a function as an analytic expression, whereas Dirichlet defined it as a variable that depends in an arbitrary manner on another…