Science and technology are so intertwined that technoscience has been argued to more accurately reflect the progress of science and its impact on society, and most socioscientific issues require technoscientific reasoning. Education policy documents have long noted that the general public lacks sufficient understanding of science and technology necessary for informed decision-making regarding socioscientific/technological issues. The science–technology–society movement and scholarship addressing socioscientific issues in science education reflect efforts in the science education community to promote more informed decision-making regarding such issues. (...) Now Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics education has emerged as a major reform movement impacting science education. STEM education efforts emphasize literacy across the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, but with rare exceptions, treat issues of technology superficially and uncritically. Informed decision-making regarding many personal and societal issues requires technological literacy beyond merely becoming an enthusiastic designer or skilled user of technology, but the science education community has given little attention to what such literacy entails. Here, we present results of an extensive review of the literature regarding the nature of technology in order to identify key issues among scholars who study technology. We then provide predominant perspectives among those scholars and suggest which identified NOT issues are most essential to address as part of STEM education efforts that seek to promote informed personal and societal decision-making. (shrink)

The inclusion of Nature of Science in the science curriculum has been advocated around the world for several decades. One way of defining NOS is related to the family resemblance approach. The family resemblance idea was originally described by Wittgenstein. Subsequently, philosophers and educators have applied Wittgenstein’s idea to problems of their own disciplines. For example, Irzik and Nola adapted Wittgenstein’s generic definition of the family resemblance idea to NOS, while Erduran and Dagher reconceptualized Irzik and Nola’s FRA-to-NOS by synthesizing (...) educational applications by drawing on perspectives from science education research. In this article, we use the terminology of “Reconceptualized FRA-to-NOS ” to refer to Erduran and Dagher’s FRA version which offers an educational account inclusive of knowledge about pedagogical, instructional, curricular and assessment issues in science education. Our motivation for making this distinction is rooted in the need to clarify the various accounts of the family resemblance idea.The key components of the RFN include the aims and values of science, methods and methodological rules, scientific practices, scientific knowledge as well as the social-institutional dimensions of science including the social ethos, certification, and power relations. We investigate the potential of RFN in facilitating curriculum analysis and in determining the gaps related to NOS in the curriculum. We analyze two Turkish science curricula published 7 years apart and illustrate how RFN can contribute not only to the analysis of science curriculum itself but also to trends in science curriculum development. Furthermore, we present an analysis of documents from USA and Ireland and contrast them to the Turkish curricula thereby illustrating some trends in the coverage of RFN categories. The results indicate that while both Turkish curricula contain statements that identify science as a cognitive-epistemic system, they underemphasize science as a social-institutional system. The comparison analysis shows results such as the “scientific ethos” category being mentioned by the Irish curriculum while “social organizations and interactions” category being mentioned by the Turkish curriculum. In all documents, there was no overall coherence to NOS as a holistic narrative that would be inclusive of the various RFN categories simultaneously. The article contributes to the framing of NOS from a family resemblance perspective and highlights how RFN categories can be used as analytical tools. (shrink)

Although there is universal consensus both in the science education literature and in the science standards documents to the effect that students should learn not only the content of science but also its nature, there is little agreement about what that nature is. This led many science educators to adopt what is sometimes called “the consensus view” about the nature of science (NOS), whose goal is to teach students only those characteristics of science on which there is wide consensus. This (...) is an attractive view, but it has some shortcomings and weaknesses. In this article we present and defend an alternative approach based on the notion of family resemblance. We argue that the family resemblance approach is superior to the consensus view in several ways, which we discuss in some detail. (shrink)

Although many agree that all teaching rests on a theory of knowledge, this is an in-depth exploration of the philosophy of mathematics for education, building on the work of Lakatos and Wittgenstein.

Two fundamental questions about science are relevant for science educators: What is the nature of science? and what aspects of nature of science should be taught and learned? They are fundamental because they pertain to how science gets to be framed as a school subject and determines what aspects of it are worthy of inclusion in school science. This conceptual article re-examines extant notions of nature of science and proposes an expanded version of the Family Resemblance Approach, originally developed by (...) Irzik and Nola in which they view science as a cognitive-epistemic and as an institutional-social system. The conceptual basis of the expanded FRA is described and justified in this article based on a detailed account published elsewhere. The expanded FRA provides a useful framework for organizing science curriculum and instruction and gives rise to generative visual tools that support the implementation of a richer understanding of and about science. The practical implications for this approach have been incorporated into analysis of curriculum policy documents, curriculum implementation resources, textbook analysis and teacher education settings. (shrink)

The inclusion of engineering standards in US science education standards is potentially important because of how limited engineering education for K-12 learners is, despite the ubiquity of engineering in students’ lives. However, the majority of learners experience science education throughout their compulsory schooling. If improved engineering literacy is to be achieved, then its inclusion in science curricula is perhaps the most efficient means. One significant challenge that arises, however, is in the framing of engineering relative to science by both teachers (...) and curriculum. Science and engineering are both distinct and interdependent. The nature of the contributions of science and engineering to one another has been an area of some examination in philosophy of technology and engineering, but little framing of this relationship has been conducted with K-12 science and engineering education contexts in mind. Nature of science is a critical layer of scientific understanding that has been used to explicitly support literacy in K-16 science classrooms for decades. However, engineering cannot be authentically and appropriately supported by NOS framing. There is an immediate need for discourse on the nature of engineering knowledge but not in isolation of NOS. Given the increasing inclusion of engineering in science classrooms, relationships between NOS and NOEK are in need of explication and argument. Our purpose is to promote a discussion about NOS, engineering, and the relationship between them without misrepresenting engineering as a subdomain of science or as an oversimplification of itself. (shrink)

History, Philosophy and Science Teaching argues that science teaching and science teacher education can be improved if teachers know something of the history and philosophy of science and if these topics are included in the science curriculum. The history and philosophy of science have important roles in many of the theoretical issues that science educators need to address: the goals of science education; what constitutes an appropriate science curriculum for all students; how science should be taught in traditional cultures; what (...) integrated science is; how scientific literacy can be promoted; and the conflict which can occur between science curriculum and deep-seated religious or cultural values and knowledge. In part, answers to these questions hinge on views about the nature of science, views that are best informed by historical and philosophical study. Outlining the history of liberal, or contextual, approaches to the teaching of science, Michael Matthews elaborates contemporary curriculum developments that explicitly address questions about the nature and the history of science. He provides examples of classroom teaching and develops useful arguments on constructivism, multicultural science education and teacher education. The book will appeal to school and university science teachers, educators of science teachers, and historians and philosophers of science. (shrink)