This article reports on the effect of textbook analysis as a tool of teacher professional development on nature of science (NOS) understanding of 10 science teachers in South Africa. The teacher professional development program (TPDP) was based on an explicit reflective methodology of textbook analysis and conducted online due to the Covid-induced lockdown. NOS understanding of the participant teachers was documented pre-training and post-training using a questionnaire designed by the researchers, termed the IFVNOS questionnaire. This tool was formulated based on the views of nature of science questionnaire version C (VNOSC) and the reconceptualised family resemblance approach (RFN) questionnaire. The same tool was used pre- and post-training. A comparison was made of the pre- and post-training results and it was found that there was a general individual increase in NOS understanding in 9 of the 10 teachers. The creative, scientific knowledge, science methods and ethical practices NOS aspects showed the greatest improvement in understanding by the teachers as a collective, whilst inferential NOS showed no overall change in understanding. This study showed that textbook analysis can be used as a professional development tool to improve NOS understanding of in-service science teachers.

People who hold multiplicistic (multiplist) epistemic beliefs about science tend to believe that scientific knowledge is always subjective and that varying opinions on a scientific matter are equally valid. Research suggests that multiplist epistemic beliefs may be maladaptive and lead to a radically subjective view of science. Little is known about the association between such beliefs and mistrust in science/scientists and the tendency to believe in misinformation. The aims of this study were to examine: (a) the degree to which multiplist epistemic beliefs about science are associated with COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs and science-related conspiracy beliefs, (b) the degree to which trust in science mediates the association between multiplist epistemic beliefs about science and conspiracy beliefs, and (c) the extent to which COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs and science-related conspiracy beliefs are associated with compliance with COVID-19 prevention guidelines. Participants were 210 undergraduate students attending a Hispanic-serving institution located in a large city in the southern U.S. Path analysis results indicated that multiplist epistemic beliefs about science were positively associated with science-related conspiracy beliefs after accounting for fundamentalism and conservatism. Moreover, trust in science mediated the positive association between multiplist epistemic beliefs about science and COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs. Finally, belief in COVID-19 conspiracies was negatively associated with COVID-19 prevention guideline compliance.

As part of a growing emphasis on "STEM," engineering has gained prominence in precollege education. In response to that trend, an emerging area of educational research focuses on the "Nature of Engineering" (NOE), a collection of ideas about what engineering is, what engineers do, and how engineering is related to science and society. In recent years, multiple NOE frameworks have been developed, along with associated NOE instruments. Thus far, NOE research has often taken cues and utilized concepts from the extensive body of nature of science literature. While there is much to be gained from nature of science research, in this paper I raise concerns with using the nature of science as a template for the NOE. I examine several NOE frameworks and identify issues and gaps that arise from the application of nature of science-based approaches. That analysis indicates that extant NOE frameworks overlook the professional contexts in which engineering work occurs, and the ways that those contexts cause engineering practice to differ from that of science. Attending to and understanding the professional context of engineering is essential for describing the sociocultural dimensions of the NOE, which are of primary importance when it comes to engineering literacy. In addition to clarifying the NOE, I offer suggestions for how giving more attention to these NOE dimensions can move this field of research, and precollege engineering instruction, forward.

Science educators report that students struggle with understanding, using, and evaluating the evidence underpinning scientific knowledge. However, there are not many studies focused on helping instructors address those difficulties. Here, we report on a laboratory instructor's scaffolding of students' evidentiary reasoning with and about evidence for evolutionary trees with guidance from the Conceptual Analysis of Disciplinary Evidence (CADE) framework, which links biological knowledge with epistemic considerations. To consider both domain-general and discipline-specific aspects of evidence, CADE was implemented to inform scaffolds in two ways: (1) generic evidence scaffolds (GES) reminded students of general epistemic considerations; (2) disciplinary evidence scaffolds (DES) explicitly reminded students of the disciplinary knowledge of relevance for considering biological evidence. An instructor's lab discussions were compared before and after they had a workshop with CADE. CADE helped the lab instructor facilitate students' evidentiary reasoning about evolutionary trees. In comparison to baseline, both GES and DES discussions covered more aspects and relationships among types of evidence for evolutionary tree-thinking and the instructor prompted more kinds of general epistemic considerations and biological knowledge. DES discussions emphasized the importance of disciplinary knowledge for research design. The CADE framework guided planning and implementation of intentional scaffolding aimed at guiding evidentiary reasoning.

Even though it is widely held that the theory of evolution is one of the pillars of the biological sciences, as we begin the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is alarming how little we know about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors and non-STEM majors' misconceptions about evolution in countries such as Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Greece, to name a few. The situation is even more complicated if we acknowledge that contemporary educational approaches (e.g., student-centered learning) mean that students' misconceptions are one of the multiple aspects that influence the construction of meaningful learning. Here, we present a picture of Colombian STEM/non-STEM majors' misconceptions about evolution. Participants were 547 students from different STEM/non-STEM majors (278 females and 269 males, 16-24 years old). During 5 years (10 academic semesters), data were collected from students' responses to an 11-item questionnaire administered in a Colombian university. We hypothesized that the academic semester within these 5 years in which each student completed the instrument as well as respondents' age, gender, and/or major may influence their misconceptions about evolution. Results reveal that participants had a moderate understanding of evolution. Also, we found a limited understanding of microevolution among participants. Furthermore, cross-sectional analyses of differences in undergraduates' responses across demographic variables showed that despite apparent differences, these were not reliable since the differences were not statistically significant. Implications for evolution education are discussed.

Nine years after reconceptualizing the nature of science for science education using the family resemblance approach (FRA) (Erduran & Dagher, 2014a), the time is ripe for taking stock of what this approach has accomplished, and what future research it can facilitate. This reflective paper aims to accomplish three goals. The first addresses several questions related to the FRA for the purpose of ensuring that the applications of FRA in science education are based on robust understanding of the framework. The second discusses the significance of the FRA by highlighting its capacity to support science educators with the exploration of a wide range of contemporary issues that are relevant to how teachers and learners perceive and experience science. The third goal of the paper offers recommendations for future directions in FRA research in the areas of science identity development and multicultural education as well as curriculum, instruction, and assessment in science education.

This study explored Indonesian prospective teachers' views on the adapted (including global socio-scientific issues) and revisited (including local socio-scientific issues) versions of the scientific habits of mind (SHOM) scale and compared their SHOM levels concerning teacher education programs and grades. The sample of the study consisted of 1298 Indonesian prospective teachers drawn from departments of chemistry education, biology education, science education, elementary teacher education, and mathematics education. The adapted and revisited versions of SHOM scale were used to collect data. The result showed that the locality of socio-scientific issues (SSI), grade, and teacher education program somewhat influenced the Indonesian prospective teachers' SHOM levels. Also, their familiarity with local SSI acted as a cornerstone to make a decision about SSI via SHOM. This study suggests that teacher education programs should be enriched with undergraduate courses (e.g., integrating SSI into SHOM, measuring SSI with SHOM, ethnoscience through SSI and SHOM) to stimulate the Indonesian prospective teachers' SHOM levels via SSI.

With the continued unfolding of major climatic shifts, questions continue to emerge about how to approach climate change in the science classroom, at least in the USA where it is often perceived as socio-politically controversial. Broadly, research in science education has shown that the learning process around climate change is highly complex and variable, and our understanding of it remains emergent. This study argues that when designing learning experiences for issues like climate change, we must consider students' prior knowledge of the social world. Using ideology as a theoretical lens, this study then examines discourse data of several classroom elicitation discussions in two sections of a 9th grade US classroom to clarify what intuitive understandings of the social world and assumptions students bring to their classroom learning about climate change. Moment-by-moment discourse analysis shows the emergence of assumptions of a sharply divided social world and the making material of an ideology that reflects these divisions. This study considers implications for such prior knowledge on scientific sensemaking and offers implications for science teaching and future research.

Beginning 60 years ago, Thomas Kuhn has had a significant impact across the academy and on culture more widely. And he had a great impact on science education research, theorising, and pedagogy. For the majority of educators, the second edition (1970) of his (Kuhn, 1970a) articulated the very nature of the science, the discipline they were teaching. More particularly, Kuhn's book directly influenced four burgeoning research fields in science education: Children's Conceptual Change, Constructivism, Science-Technology-Society studies, and Cultural Studies of Science Education. This paper looks back to the Kuhnian years in science education and to the long shadow they cast. The discipline of science education needs to learn from its past so that comparable mistakes might be averted in the future. Kuhn's influence was good and bad. Good, that he brought HPS to so many; bad, that, on key points, his account of science was flawed. This paper will document the book's two fundamental errors: namely, its Kantian-influenced ontological idealism and its claims of incommensurability between competing paradigms. Both had significant flow-on effects. Although the book had many positive features, this paper will document how most of these ideas and insights were well established in HPS literature at the time of its 1962 publication. Kuhn was not trained in philosophy, he was not part of the HPS tradition, and to the detriment of all, he did not engage with it. This matters, because before publication he could have abandoned, modified, or refined much of his 'revolutionary' text. Something that he subsequently did, but this amounted to closing the gate after the horse had bolted. In particular, the education horse had well and truly bolted. While educators were rushing to adopt Kuhn, many philosophers, historians, and sociologists were rejecting him. Kuhn did modify and 'walk back' many of the head-turning, but erroneous, claims of But his retreat went largely unnoticed in education, and so the original, deeply flawed affected the four above-mentioned central research fields. The most important lesson to be learnt from science education's uncritical embrace of Kuhn and Kuhnianism is that the problems arose not from personal inadequacies; individuals are not to blame. There was a systematic, disciplinary deficiency. This needs to be addressed by raising the level of philosophical competence in the discipline, beginning with the inclusion of HPS in teacher education and graduate programmes.

Given early childhood is a critical period for acquiring the twenty-first-century skills, the present study aimed to examine the effect of design-oriented STEM activities on the twenty-first-century skills of preschool children in line with the experimental design. A mixed factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA) of 3 (time: pre-test, post-test and persistence) × 2 (experimental group and control group) was used to test the hypothesis. The Bayesian factor analysis for mixed data was performed to identify the effects of design-oriented STEM education on differences between groups as well as within the group. The study results indicated that design-oriented STEM activities permanently increased the total scores of the children in the experimental group as regards the twenty-first-century skills. It also appeared that design-oriented STEM activities permanently enhanced all sub-dimensions of life and career skills; learning and innovation skills; and information, media and technology skills. In the end, a number of recommendations were presented in accordance with the results of the study.

Studies consistently show the social impact of spreading epistemologically unfounded beliefs (or 'conspiracy beliefs'), including negative effects on public health. The present study identified correlations among epistemologically unfounded beliefs, authoritarianism, and scientific literacy in a representative sample of 303 Slovak secondary school students, using the Epistemologically Unfounded Beliefs Scale, Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale, and Scientific Reasoning Scale. Statistical analysis confirmed significant correlations among the three variables. The findings suggest that increasing scientific literacy could simultaneously reduce authoritarianism and epistemologically unfounded beliefs in secondary school students.

The notion of family resemblance has recently emerged as a promising and fruitful approach to characterising the nature of science (NOS) in science education research, offering solutions to some perplexing challenges such as capturing both the domain-general and domain-specific features of science with a single framework. At the same time, however, criticism has been levelled that the resemblance might eventually extend to certain activities that are not scientific but pose as science. This would be an undesirable consequence for science educators, particularly given the increasing need for individuals to discern pseudoscientific claims circulated on social media from scientific information. Many pseudoscientific and non-scientific activities resemble science in terms of their aim to explain nature, their use of evidence-based methods, and their interrelation with politics and society. In this theoretical article, we build on the concept of family resemblance to consider how it can simultaneously explain the diversity and unity of science and help students to learn about the nature of science and that of pseudoscience in science education. We put forward three principles that can guide teaching about pseudoscience based on the family resemblance conceptualisation of science.

The paper reports an empirical study on the relationship between middle school students' understanding of nature of science (NOS) and their metacognitive awareness. The reconceptualised family resemblance approach to the nature of science (RFN) (Erduran & Dagher, 2014; Kaya & Erduran, 2016) as a holistic framework that covers science as epistemic-cognitive and social system guided the study. A total of 701 students (180 5, 167 6, 170 7, and 184 8 grade) and 3 students from each grade level (in total 12 students) who have low, moderate, high-RFN understanding, and metacognitive awareness levels were interviewed. The data sources are the "RFN Student Questionnaire," "Metacognitive Awareness Inventory for Children," and interviews. The data was analyzed with Pearson product-moment and thematic analysis. The results indicated that there is a statistically positive relationship between middle school students' RFN understanding and their metacognitive awareness. Furthermore, the results of the interviews showed that students' responses to RFN and metacognitive awareness questions were aligned and compatible. The students with high metacognitive awareness had higher RFN understanding and those with lower metacognitive awareness had lower RFN understanding. This relationship was evident for each grade level student separately as well. The study opens a new study area in terms of the use of metacognitive strategies in RFN-enriched lessons for experimental and causal-comparative designs. The teacher education programs or curriculum studies can consider utilization of metacognitive prompts in NOS teaching.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and adapting the classes urgently to distance learning, directing students' interest in the course content became challenging. The solution to this challenge emerges through creative pedagogies that integrate the instructional methods with new technologies like augmented reality (AR). Although the use of AR in science education is increasing, the integration of AR into science classes is still naive. The lack of the ability to identify misinformation in the COVID-19 pandemic process has revealed the importance of developing students' critical thinking skills and argumentation abilities. The purpose of this study was to examine the change in critical thinking skills and argumentation abilities through augmented reality-based argumentation activities in teaching astronomy content. The participants were 79 seventh grade students from a private school. In this case study, the examination of the verbal arguments of students showed that all groups engaged in the argumentation and produced quality arguments. The critical thinking skills of the students developed until the middle of the intervention, and the frequency of using critical thinking skills varied after the middle of the intervention. The findings highlight the role of AR-based argumentation activities in students' critical thinking skills and argumentation in science education.

The paper reports about the outcome of a systematic review of research on family resemblance approach (FRA) to nature of science in (NOS) science education. FRA is a relatively recent perspective on NOS being a system of cognitive-epistemic and social-institutional aspects of science. FRA thus consists of a set of categories such as aims and values, practices, knowledge and social organizations in relation to NOS. Since the introduction of the FRA, there has been increasing interest in investigations about how FRA can be of use in science education both empirically and practically. A journal content analysis was conducted in order to investigate which FRA categories are covered in journal articles and to identify the characteristics of the studies that have used FRA. These characteristics included the target level of education and focus on pre- or in-service teachers. Furthermore, epistemic network analysis of theoretical and empirical papers was conducted to determine the extent to which the studies incorporated various key themes about FRA, such as its transferability to other domains and differentiation of the social-institutional system categories. The findings illustrate an increasing number of empirical studies using FRA in recent years and broad coverage in science education. Although the social-institutional system categories included intraconnections, these were not as strong as those intraconnections among categories within the cognitive-epistemic system. Future research directions for the use of FRA in K-12 science education are discussed.

Understanding how and why science works is a major goal of science education. The aim of this article is to analyze the influence of a research experience in real science contexts, in the thinking and practice of preservice elementary teachers regarding inquiry and nature of science teaching. An in-depth case study which highlights the affordances and shortcomings of the participants' immersion in real science contexts and in seminars and its impact on participants' thoughts and practices of nature of science and inquiry will be presented. Interviews, observations, diaries, and videotaped seminars were used for data collection. Our findings suggest that the research experience, as well as moments of reflection, contributed to enhance the relevance of an inquiry-based teaching and teaching about NOS in the participants' discourse. However, the implementation of these classroom practices was limited and seemingly prevented due to various constraints, namely the initial teacher training, participants' lack of teaching experience, and those associated with elementary students and the curriculum.

With regard to current controversial public discussions about the credibility of scientific knowledge, it seems particularly important that students possess adequate ideas about the tentativeness of scientific knowledge, which is a key aspect of nature of science. However, international studies show that many pre-service science teachers tend to have naïve conceptions about the tentativeness and these conceptions turn out to be resistant to change. So far, no research was done, on the conceptions of German pre-service chemistry teachers about tentativeness. Therefore, two empirical, qualitative research studies were conducted. The first study with 50 participants was to investigate, which conceptions about tentativeness German pre-service chemistry teachers possess, what the origins of these conceptions are and if they are resistant to change. In a second study with 56 participants, it was examined how a more adequate and functional understanding could be promoted. Data were collected by using different methods, such as open-ended questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. The participants' views about tentativeness were assigned to different categories. Results show that most participants held inconsistent or only partially informed views on tentativeness. The views turn out to be resistant to change, and many participants are not able to explain their ideas. And if so, their explanations are mostly restricted to scientific theories. Additionally, dealing with tentativeness unsettles some participants. To promote an adequate understanding, new approaches were developed, like the BlackTube activity. Additionally, instructions should focus on the durability of scientific knowledge. Furthermore, a differentiated reflection on different types of scientific knowledge seems necessary.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the role of informed decision-making in times of crisis and the need for equipping teachers with the ability to address socioscientific issues in the classroom. In this study, we examine the features of socioscientific reasoning found in preservice elementary teachers' group discussions on the issue of school reopening during the pandemic. Using socioscientific reasoning and perspective taking as theoretical lenses, we analyzed how the participants constructed and justified arguments about the issue from the perspectives of three stakeholders the Minister of Education, a teacher, and a parent. The analysis revealed the participants' tendency to reach a premature decision and then cherry-pick evidence supporting the predetermined conclusion. As they examined relevant evidence, they often specified their initial claims by adding conditions to make it less objectionable and more defensible. We also illustrate how they used two different types of evidence, mechanistic and epidemiological, to support their claims about school reopening, and how perspective taking influenced their reasoning processes. Based on these findings, we discuss the potential of the perspective-based approach for supporting elementary teachers' decision-making about socioscientific issues.

Modern democratic societies tend to appeal to the authority of science when dealing with important challenges and solving their problems. Nevertheless, distrust in science remains widespread among the public, and, as a result, scientific voices are often ignored or discarded in favour of other perspectives. Though superficially "democratic", such a demotion of science in fact hinders democratic societies in effectively tackling their problems. Worryingly, some philosophers have provided ammunition to this distrust and scepticism of science. They either portray science as an institution that has unrightfully seized political power, or they claim that science constitutes only one voice among many and that scientists should know their proper place in our societies. As philosophers of science, we believe that it is potentially dangerous to undermine trust in science in this way. Instead, we believe that philosophers should help people to understand why science, even though it is far from perfect, deserves our trust and its special standing in modern societies. In this paper, we outline what such an explanation may look like from a naturalistic and pragmatic perspective, and we discuss the implications for the role of philosophy of science in science education.