In a pandemic era, it is necessary to equip individuals with the ability to make informed decisions about health issues, especially in relation to viruses and vaccines. In order to achieve this goal, science educators need to explore students' decisions and reasoning about vaccination. The aim of the study reported in the paper, therefore, is to…

The teaching of the phenomenon of radioactivity is considered a key ingredient in the path towards developing critical thinking skills in many secondary science education curricula. Despite being one of the basic concepts in general physics courses, the scientific teaching literature of the last 40 years reports a great deal of misconceptions and…

The crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic led most people all over the world to deal with a change in their perception and organization of time. This happened also, and mainly, within the educational institutions, where students and teachers had to rearrange their teaching/learning dynamics because of the forced education at a distance. In this…

Nature of science (NOS) is considered an important aspect of scientific literacy. Despite efforts in guiding school students to develop more adequate NOS views, little is known about the long-term retention of students' post-intervention views. Retention of adequate NOS views is needed for functioning as scientifically literate citizens. Moreover,…

Education systems in once-colonised locations cannot escape the abiding legacy of colonisation. Science, in particular, has played a prominent role in the reasonings and rationalisations of the colonial process. When considered in the context of an education system established by imperial powers, it is difficult to reconcile processes of…

Scientific argumentation is a key practice in the construction, confirmation, and legalization of scientific knowledge. Although studies on scientific argumentation have been relatively plentiful, there are few quantitative studies on how students mentally perceive scientific argumentation, given that traditional quantitative tools such as Likert…

Student engagement with science is a long-standing, central interest within science education research. In this article, we examine student engagement with science using a Bourdiusian lens, placing a particular emphasis on the notion of field. Over the course of one academic year, we collected data in an inner London secondary science classroom…

The activities presented in this paper are part of a wider project that investigates the effects of infusing the history of science in science teaching, toward students' learning and attitude. Focused on the work of D. Carlos de Braganca, King of Portugal from 1889 to 1908, and a pioneer oceanographer, the activities are addressed at the secondary…

In this paper we present a schematic overview of the central concepts in evolutionary theory, setting them off against the background of widespread misconceptions about them. Our aim is to provide high school teachers with (1) an overview of those particular concepts that they can expect students to have difficulties with, (2) a comparison of…

Although science, technology, society and environment (STSE) education has gained considerable force in the past few years, it has made fewer strides in practice. We suggest that "science" teacher identity plays a role in the adoption of STSE perspectives. Simply put, issues-based STSE education challenges traditional images of a science…

There has been a move in recent years towards the greater inclusion of social and ethical issues within science courses. This paper examines a new context-based course for 16-18 year-olds (Salters-Nuffield Advanced Biology) who are studying biology in England and Wales. The course is taught through contexts and has an emphasis on social issues and…

In this paper, the main points of Lamarck's and Darwin's theoretical conceptual schemes about evolution are compared to those derived from 15 years old students' explanations of evolutionary episodes. We suggest that secondary students' preconceptions should not be characterized as "Lamarckian", because they are essentially different from the…

This paper reports a 4-month study that investigated the effectiveness of curriculum materials incorporating the history of science (HOS) on learning science, understanding the nature of science (NOS), and students' interest in science. With regards to these objectives, three different class contexts were developed with three main types of…