Recent reforms in science education have promoted students’ understanding of how science works, including the methodological approaches used by scientists. Given that teachers are expected to teach and promote methodological pluralism, it is worth examining how teachers understand and view scientific methods, particularly when scientific methods are presented as a diverse array and not as a linear model based exclusively on hypothesis testing.The empirical study presented in the paper examines science teachers’ understanding of scientific methods, particularly the diversity of scientific (...) methods. Brandon’s Matrix, a philosopher’s account of scientific methods, has been adapted for educational purposes, and two tasks were developed in order to investigate teachers’ understanding of scientific methods. Fifty-six science teachers from different regions in the UK responded to an online survey.The results showed that the majority of the teachers showed satisfactory understanding of basic components of Brandon’s Matrix. However, more than half of the sample held naïve understanding of scientific methods. By providing insight into teachers’ misconceptions about scientific methods, the study provides suggestions for the design of teacher training programmes and highlights the need for explicit instruction about scientific methods. In addition, we suggest the use of heuristics such as Brandon’s Matrix for the development of pedagogical tools as well as research instruments. (shrink)

The conception of racial categories from a biological perspective is unconsciously embedded in the individual’s cognition. This is true even among university students majoring in biology and medicine. Even though students have never learned about “race” explicitly in formal biology class, they are highly likely to implicitly construct, and hold biological concepts of race. This study investigated how Korean college students majoring in General Science Education define the concept of race and acquire a scientific conception of race. The study draws (...) on Efstathiou ’s framework of the “founded concept.” Two open-ended questions regarding race conceptualization were administered to 218 college students. Furthermore, interviews with three students were conducted to explore any biological meaning of race. The results suggest four types of conception held by students about race. These were race as a typological means of distinguishing human diversity, race as a biological concept, race as a social construct, and race as a bio-social mixture. Additionally, in-depth interviews indicated that students constructed their biological concept of race unintentionally through learning biology. There are three mediators which have a role as mediator in the transfiguration process of finding and founding race concepts in a biological context: skin color, reproductive isolation, and ethnicity. Accordingly, science teachers should carefully teach this information in order to help prevent any misunderstanding of biological racial concepts. Teaching strategies and other educational implications are discussed. (shrink)

The paper analyzes focus group data to explore student perceptions of an inquiry-based undergraduate biology course. Though the course was designed to mimic the scientific process by incorporating uncertainty, peer review, and self-reflection, students came to class focused on getting As and with a developed schema for didactic instruction and passive learning. They perceived the autonomy and self-directedness of the learning experience as a threat to their grades, and responded with strategies that protected their grades and ego, but were deleterious (...) to learning. Students could identify merits of the inquiry-based approach; however, they made clear: they prioritized grades, and were unwilling to trust an unfamiliar pedagogy if they perceived it jeopardized their grades. In the framework of self-regulated learning, the discussion considers how to scaffold students to foreground learning over achievement. (shrink)

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 paper, we present an exploratory qualitative study with secondary school students aimed to investigate how they were experiencing their learning during lockdown and how, in particular, (...) learning of science contributed to rearranging their daily lifetime rituals. In order to design and carry out our investigation, we borrowed constructs coming from a research field rather unusual for science education: the field ofsociology of time. The main result concerns the discovery of the potential of the dichotomy betweenalienation from timeandtime re-appropriation.The former is a construct elaborated by the sociologist Hartmut Rosa to describe the society of acceleration in the “era offuture shock”. The latter represents an elaboration of the construct ofappropriationthat the authors had operationally defined, starting from Bakhtin’s original idea, to describe the nexus between physics learning and identity.Thanks to the elaboration of the notion oftime re-appropriationas feature of the “era ofpresent shock”, the study unveils how school science, instead of preparing the young to navigate our fast-changing and complex society, tends to create “bubbles of rituals” that detach learning from societal concern. (shrink)