This paper presents an epistemological analysis of typical didactical activities noted in early‐years science lessons, which was carried out in an attempt to diagnose the extent to which the teaching practices adopted by early‐years educators are successful in supporting young children’s understanding in science. The analysis of didactical activities used a framework that allowed us to discover whether they promoted desired connections between theoretical ideas, evidence and the material world. Theoretical ideas, evidence and the material world are entities internal to scientific inquiry and, in educational contexts, connections between them are considered essential in assisting the development of young children’s scientific thinking. The results indicated that in the early‐years science classroom scientific activity was mainly confined to the representational level. Intervention practices into the material world were limited, and were based on collected evidence. No interventions based on ideas were identified in the science lessons. Missing links between evidence and theory and between ideas and the material world suggest that the didactical activities analysed did not promote scientific understanding.

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.

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 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.