This study investigates the development and impact of a teaching–learning sequence (TLS) designed for biology students with the aim of enhancing their understanding of key aspects of the nature of science (NOS) and the nature of scientific inquiry (NOSI). The TLS was developed within a design-based research (DBR) framework and centers on Griffith’s pivotal historical experiment to provide contextual depth and integrate both epistemic and non-epistemic dimensions of science. Instruction was based on explicit and reflective inquiry involving progressive scaffolding of students from structured towards more open investigative activities. An initial implementation with nine students, drawing on data from questionnaires and interviews, revealed their prior views regarding several NOS and NOSI aspects. Following the TLS, students demonstrated a more sophisticated understanding of the role of research questions in guiding experimental design, as well as a richer conception of scientific hypotheses. They also internalized the experimental logic underlying Griffith’s work and recognized the importance of creativity and imagination in scientific practice. The study discusses contextual limitations and highlights the potential of TLSs to provide robust instructional contexts, making NOS and NOSI aspects meaningful and accessible to students through historical experiments.

The present study aims to design an instruction that engages nature of science (NOS) and nature of scientific inquiry (NOSI) learning objectives with the teaching and learning of important historical experiments taught around the world and presented in most biology textbooks such as those by Griffith and by Avery, MacLeod, and McCarty. The design process involves decisions about which NOS and NOSI aspects to teach and decisions about how to teach. With respect to the latter decisions, our preference is an explicit/reflective perspective used in an overarching inquiry-based science teaching and history of science instructional context. The proposed course is going to provide high school students meaningful and practical inquiry-based experiences through the use of simulated experiments and would help their teachers (a) illuminate several procedural aspects of the taught experiments (b) internalize the importance of teaching NOS and NOSI aspects (c) acquire an integrative understanding of the process of scientific inquiry and the product of that inquiry, namely scientific knowledge, and (d) portray science less as a body of knowledge and more as a creative process involving human and non-human actors. The potential benefits of our proposed instruction for learners’ scientific literacy are also discussed.

The present study investigates how Greek in-service secondary education biology teachers understand the unique features of school biology and physics when considering the biological theoretical edifice and method. Our theoretical framework focuses on important differences that exist between the neo-Darwinian and Newtonian worldviews, while our methodology involves questionnaires and mainly individual interviews with fourteen (14) biology teachers. The study findings indicate that biology teachers encounter difficulties in unraveling the distinction between nomothetic and non-nomothetic natural sciences and in understanding the historical character of biology. They also emphasize the importance of scientific laws and experimentation when considering the epistemological features of biology, and the reason is that they reflect on the issue of what science or scientific knowledge is by simultaneously adopting two contradictory perspectives. On the one hand, they stress what a science should be if it is to be called ‘science’, and on the other hand, they focus on how a particular science, such as biology behaves. Unavoidably, a logical tension is created in their minds, and as a way of solving this tension, they view biology as being in a state of ongoing change towards an ideal, and, in many aspects, a positivistic pattern of science.

This paper investigates whether and how primary school students improve their epistemic understanding about a particular aspect of the nature of inquiry (NOSI), namely, the 'non-linear nature of inquiry' through an explicit-reflective or implicit instruction. The sample consisted of 30 5th grade students, who were randomly divided into two groups: the implicit -T1 (N = 14) and the explicit -T2 (N = 16). Instruction followed an inquiry model, lasting fourteen (14) hours for each group. T2 was taught the non-linear nature of inquiry explicitly, in contrast to T1, which was expected to acquire such understanding without direct instruction regarding NOSI. A written questionnaire in conjunction with individual semi-structured interviews was used to assess students' views before and after instruction. Content analysis was conducted with the data from the written questionnaire and the interview transcripts. The pre-test showed that students seem to argue over the alternative view on the linear nature of the inquiry procedure. The post-test results support that epistemic understanding of the explicit group were significantly improved towards more informed levels in contrast to the implicit group, whose epistemic understandings appeared not to change or in some cases fell to a lower level.

The present study aims to design an instruction that engages nature of science (NOS) and nature of the sciences (NOTSs) learning objectives with the teaching and learning of a core biological concept or ‘big’ idea, namely homeostasis. The design process involves choices regarding what NOS and NOTSs aspects are to be taught, while the formulation of these aspects is in accordance with science-content learning objectives, such as the understanding of definitional features of homeostasis and human thermoregulatory mechanisms, and difficulties that students face in accomplishing these objectives. Through NOS and NOTSs learning objectives, students are expected to be informed of (a) the theory-laden character of scientific knowledge, (b) the hierarchical organization of primary ontological levels, (c) a model focusing on aspects of biological causality (d) definitional and accompanying features of the notion of mechanism, and (e) how to search for finding mechanisms including the interrelation of structure and function. Moreover, students are instructed in elaborating on their causal reasoning through a model and a metaphor (e.g., air-condition) when considering human thermoregulatory mechanisms. The potential benefits of the teaching of all these items to students’ understanding of homeostasis are also discussed.

This empirical study investigates the main features of curricula and contexts that favor or hinder the process of transfer of a teaching-learning sequence cris) from the designers' original situation to a host one. The specific research questions addressed were (RQ1) what were the changes made during the process of transfer in the new context? (RQ2) What were the similarities or differences between the national curricula and contexts that influenced the process of transfer? To answer our research questions, we chose two TLSs, one about optical properties of materials, the other about thermal conductivity, originally designed by two groups of researchers and experienced teachers in Italy and Greece, respectively. The transfer process was analyzed using the "adaptation and reinvention" model, originally developed for the management knowledge research field, while the construct of "institutional distance" was used to describe the influence of country-specific aspects on the transfer process. Data collected included background documents that describe the principles underlying the TLSs design, the decisions and changes made to the original TLSs by the hosting group, and reports on the TLS implementation in classroom practice in the original and in the host context. Content analysis was used to analyze data. Results show that the similarities between the two national curricula and interactions between the involved groups acted mainly as facilitators of the transfer process.

Many biology textbooks and test banks accompanying these textbooks have begun to classify multiple-choice questions (MCQs) according to Bloom’s taxonomy. Teachers, however, encounter significant difficulties in adjusting their assessment practices to the low performance of students and in helping them enhance their respective cognitive skills because the mental processes that Bloom’s categories indicate are captured from the perspective of learners’ mental behaviour or observable learning outcomes; learners are treated more as black boxes and less as input-stateoutput subjects, as constructivist learning theories suggest. Thus, interior mental facts and processes occurring in their minds remain unexplored. The purpose of the present paper is to open learners’ black boxes and reveal the specific mental facts and processes occurring in their cognitive structures when answering Bloom’s classified MCQs, whose subject matter content concerns biological concepts. To accomplish this purpose, we associate knowledge drawn from the philosophy of biology with the conceptual nature of Bloom’s lower-level categories such as ‘knowledge’ and ‘comprehension’. This knowledge involves types of statements and arguments that can be found in scientific language, along with different and interrelated aspects of biological concepts that learners should know if they are to understand declarative knowledge. The implications of our epistemological analysis for the nature of MCQ distractors and the notion of misconceptions will also be discussed.

This essay is a synthesis of more than twenty years of research, already published, on teaching and learning fluids and pressure. We examine teaching fluids globally, i.e., the content to be taught and its transformations, students' alternative conceptions and their remediation, the sequence of educational activities, being right for students' understanding, as well as tasks for evaluating their conceptual evolution. Our samples are junior high school students and primary school student-teachers. This long-term study combines research and development concerning teaching and learning fluids and has evolved through iteratively based design application and reflective feedback related to empirical data. The results of our research include several publications.

In this study we present the structure and implementation of a model-based inquiry teaching-learning sequence (TLS) integrating expressive, experimental and exploratory modelling pedagogies in a cyclic manner, with the aim of enhancing primary education student teachers' epistemological beliefs about the aspects, nature, purpose and change of models as well as their conceptual understanding of light phenomena related to properties of optical fibres. The subjects were 16 prospective primary teachers involved in modelling activities, employing both hands-on experiments and computer modelling activities, based on the application of the ray model. Student teachers were tested before and after the implementation of the TLS by semi-structured interviews and a written questionnaire. Results show that before the TLS most students adopted epistemologically naive realistic beliefs about models, whereas after the TLS there was an overall significant transition from naive to more sophisticated epistemological beliefs, as well as significant improvements in their conceptual knowledge about light phenomena. Nevertheless, the relation between epistemological beliefs and conceptual understanding seems to be aspect-dependent, so our evidence suggests that more educational effort is required in order to establish a coherent relationship between them.

The present essay examines the emerging issue of domain-general versus domain-specific nature of science (NOS) understandings from a perspective that illuminates the value of domain-specific philosophies of science for the growth and development of the NOS educational field. Under the assumption that individual sciences do have their own character, we address the unique ontological, methodological, and epistemological features of Newtonian physics and evolutionary biology and we articulate the important differences that exist between the worldviews associated with these scientific fields, namely, the Newtonian and the neo-Darwinian scientific worldviews. The former worldview is consistent in many respects with assumptions that are grounded on positivism, whereas the latter worldview provides an alternative understanding of NOS, which is predominately based in the techniques of hermeneutics and historical sciences. We subsequently attempt to present the current inadequacies and weaknesses that the NOS field is challenged with as a result of not incorporating the differences between the Newtonian and neo-Darwinian worldviews into its research or instructional agenda. In addition, we outline the heuristic power for the NOS field that may accompany a potential shift from a homogeneous view of NOS to a view more informed by the specificities of any particular science or scientific field.

This work sets out to indicate whether certain beliefs, be they religious convictions or pseudoscientific beliefs, are related in some way and contribute to poor scientific understanding. Educators were probed for their understanding of natural phenomena in the form of a questionnaire, and correlations were determined between specific questions. There were more interquestion significant correlations in the Greek sample but not in the Irish sample. We found a range of beliefs and abilities concerning answers on evolution, genetics, alternative medicine, and cosmology. However, the ability to answer scientific questions well was not linked significantly to holding religious beliefs.

The present chapter focuses on the use of a submicroscopic model as an investigative tool by students in their study of electrostatic polarization. The aim of the research was to investigate whether students are able to use the model in order to predict electrical interactions between charged and uncharged objects, whether students gain awareness of the use of the model as an investigative tool, and which features of the model helped them to predict the phenomenon. Simulated models showed multiple representations of the structural and behavioral aspects of atoms. The teaching unit was used with one group of lower secondary students (ages 12–15) and one group of student teachers. In the teaching unit, students, initially, were asked to predict the phenomenon, and then they were introduced to the model, they were asked to predict again the same phenomenon, and afterward they observed the real experiment and participated in a metacognitive phase in order to reflect on the way they have worked with the model. Data were obtained from the analysis of written answers and related transcribed group interviews conducted during the course of instruction. Results showed that both university and lower secondary school students cited and identified different elements of the model that helped them to predict the electrostatic polarization phenomena under study. Both groups seem to have developed an understanding of aspects of the function of submicroscopic models as investigative tool.