In this paper, we discuss the well-known teaching challenge of how to provide undergraduate students with basic chemistry knowledge without making them experience these basics as meaningless and unintelligible. First, we situate the challenge in a classic dilemma: should we teach the necessary basic facts before the chemical explanations or should the explanations be taught before or in parallel to these facts? Here we draw on examples from interviews with graduate students reflecting on their experiences regarding their studies at the undergraduate level. Second, we suggest a way out of the dilemma, through a shift in perspective from the typical progression of facts and explanations towards a purpose and activity-based progression. We conclude with a discussion of implications of such a shift for university chemistry education together with suggestions for future research.

Anthropomorphisms are widespread at all levels of the educational system even among science experts. This has led to a shift in how anthropomorphisms are viewed in science education, from a discussion of whether they should be allowed or avoided towards an interest in their role in supporting students’ understanding of science. In this study we examine the role of anthropomorphisms in supporting students’ understanding of chemistry. We analyze examples from undergraduate students’ discussions during problem-solving classes through the use of practical epistemology analysis (PEA). Findings suggest that students invoked anthropomorphisms alongside technical relations which together produced more or less chemically appropriate explanations. Also, anthropomorphisms constitute potentially productive points of departure for rendering students’ explanations more chemically appropriate. The implications of this study refer to the need to deal with anthropomorphisms explicitly and repeatedly as well as to encourage explicit connections between different parts of the explanation - teleological as well as causal.

In this study, we explore the issues and challenges involved in supporting students’ learning to discern relevant and critical aspects of determining oxidation states of atoms in complex molecules. We present a detailed case of an interaction between three students and a tutor during a problem-solving class, using the analytical tool of practical epistemology analysis (PEA). The results show that the ability to make relevant distinctions between the different parts of a molecule for solving the problem, even with the guidance of the tutor, seemed to be challenging for students. These shifts were connected to both purposes that were specific for solving the problem at hand, and additional purposes for general learning of the subject matter, in this case how to assign oxidation states in molecules. The students sometimes could not follow the additional purposes introduced by the tutor, which made the related distinctions more confusing. Our results indicate that in order to provide adequate support and guidance for students the tutor needs to consider how to sequence, move between, and productively connect the different purposes introduced in a tutor-student interaction. One way of doing that is by first pursuing the purposes for solving the problem and then successively introduce additional, more general purposes for developing students’ learning of the subject matter studied. Further recommendations drawn from this study are discussed as well.

Recent efforts to design and study Pre-service Science Teacher Education have focused on engaging future teachers in teaching practices. This focus on practices comes with an explicit intention to blend aspects of knowledge and doing that has been historically separate in other efforts to teach novice learners practical aspects of their profession. This intention brings particular challenges to EU preservice teacher preparation programs that need to reconsider how to incorporate aspects of practices into their science education courses. These challenges not only emerge from the novelty and interrelated nature of these practices, but also from lack of clear ways of articulating what these practices are and look like across international teacher educational contexts. This paper brings together four EU studies and an international discussant that explore possibilities to embrace and respond to these challenges and being a cross-contextual conversation about science teacher education. 

It is commonly argued that socio-economic inequalities can explain many of the differences in achievement and participation in science education that have been reported among countries and among schools within a country. We addressed this issue by examining (a) the relationship between variables associated with socio-economic background and application frequencies to the Swedish Natural Science Programme (NSP) in upper secondary school and (b) whether there are lower secondary schools in Sweden that seem to compensate for these variables. Data from Statistics Sweden (SCB) covering the whole population of 106,483 ninth-grade students were used to calculate the probability for each student to apply to the NSP. Our results indicate that the variables, such as parental educational level and grades, have explanatory power, but with varying effect for different subpopulations of students. For example, grades in mathematics have a greater impact than grades in science for females’ choice of the NSP. The opposite holds for male students. Out of 1,342 schools, 158 deviated significantly from predicted, that is, the students in these schools applied to the NSP in greater or lesser extent than expected. The number of deviating schools is greater than predicted by pure random variation. This suggests that variables of socio-economic background are only a partial explanation of the application frequencies, and that the deviation needs to be investigated further. Our findings suggest that in order to understand why schools deviate positively and so compensate for the socio-economic background of their students, we need to study their practices more closely

In this study, we examined how a teacher may make a difference to the way interest develops in a science classroom, especially for students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. We adopted a methodology based on the concept of taste for science drawing on the work of John Dewey and Pierre Bourdieu. We investigated through transcripts from video recordings how such a taste is socially constituted in a 9th grade (ages 15–16) science classroom, where there was evidence that the teacher was making a positive difference to students’ post-compulsory school choice with regard to science. Salient findings regarding how this teacher supported students’ interest are summarized. For example, the teacher consistently followed up how the students acknowledged and enjoyed purposes, norms, and values of the science practice and so ensuing that they could participate successfully. During these instances, feelings and personal contributions of the students were also acknowledged and made continuous with the scientific practice. The results were compared with earlier research, implications are discussed, and some suggestions are given about how these can be used by teachers in order to support student interest.

In this paper, we review research on how students' interest in science changes through the primary to secondary school transition. In the literature, the findings generally show that primary students enjoy science but come to lose interest during secondary school. As this claim is based mainly on interview and questionnaire data, that is on secondary reports from students about their interest in science, these results are reexamined through our own extensive material from primary and secondary school on how interest is constituted through classroom discourse. Our results suggest the possibility that primary students do not lose their interest in science, but rather that an interest in science is never constituted. The overview indicates that studies relying on interviews and questionnaires make it difficult to ascertain what the actual object of interest is when students act in the science classroom. The possibility suggested should, if valid, have consequences for science education and be worthy of further examination.

In this article we respond to the discussion by Alexandra Schindel Dimick regarding how the taste analysis presented in our feature article can be expanded within a Bourdieuan framework. Here we acknowledge the significance of field theory to introduce wider reflexivity on the kind of taste that is constituted in the science classroom, while we at the same time emphasize the importance of differentiating between how taste is reproduced versus how it is changed through teaching. The contribution of our methodology is mainly to offer the possibility to empirically analyze changes in this taste, and how teaching can make a difference in regard to students’ home backgrounds. However, our last two steps of our taste analysis include asking questions about how the taste developing in the classroom relates more widely in society. Schindel Dimick shows how these two steps can be productively expanded by a wider societal field analysis.

In this paper we present a methodological approach for analyzing the transformation of interest in science through classroom talk and action. To this end, we use the construct of taste for scienceas a social and communicative operationalization, or proxy, to the more psychologically oriented construct of interest. To gain a taste for science as part of school science activities means developing habits of performing and valuing certain distinctions about ways to talk, act and be that are jointly construed as belonging in the school science classroom. In this view, to learn science is not only about learning the curriculum content, but also about learning a normative and aesthetic content in terms of habits of distinguishing and valuing. The approach thus complements previous studies on students’ interest in science, by making it possible to analyze how taste for science is constituted, moment-by-moment, through talk and action in the science classroom. In developing the method, we supplement theoretical constructs coming from pragmatism and Pierre Bourdieu with empirical data from a lower secondary science classroom. The application of the method to this classroom demonstrates the potential that the approach has for analyzing how conceptual, normative, and aesthetic distinctions within the science classroom interact in the constitution of taste for, and thereby potentially also in the development of interest in science among students.

The thesis takes its departure from the extensive literature on students’ alternative ideas in science. Although describing students’ conceptual knowledge in many science areas, the literature offers little about how this knowledge enters into the science learning process. Neither has it focused on how particulars and contingencies of curricular materials enter into the learning process. In this thesis I make high-resolution analyses of students’ learning in action during school science activities about real or idealized electrochemical cells. I use a discursive mechanism of learning developed to describe how students become participants in new practices through slow changes in word use. Specifically, I examine how alternative and accepted scientific ideas, as well as curricular materials, enter into students’ reasoning. The results are then used for producing hypotheses over how a teacher can support students’ science learning. Alternative ideas in electrochemistry did not necessarily interfere negatively with, and were sometimes productive for, students’ reasoning during the activities. Students included the particulars and contingencies of curricular materials in their reasoning not only when interacting with a real electrochemical cell but also in a more theoretical concept mapping activity about an idealized cell. Through taxonomic and correlational investigations students connected the particulars and contingencies of the real electrochemical cell to the generic knowledge of electrochemistry. When actively introduced by the researcher, such investigations had consequences for how single students framed their explanations of a real electrochemical cell. The results indicate ways in which teachers may encourage the productive use of contingencies to promote learning within the science classroom. However, this may require consideration of what students say in terms of consequences for their further learning rather than in terms of correct or incorrect content.

In this article, I make a case for the potential educative worth of distractions for learning science in the school laboratory. Distractions are operationalized as experiences lying outside the main purpose of the laboratory activity, thereby diverting students’ attention from that purpose. Through a practical epistemology analysis, I examined in close detail the conversations of three groups of high school students trying to explain how a real galvanic cell works. The three groups experienced the same two distractions, (1) a nonworking light-emitting diode and (2) negative readings on a voltmeter. The analysis reveals how one of the groups, through a series of contingencies, successively made the two distractions continuous with the main purpose of the activity. In the remaining two groups, no such continuity was established. The results show that (a) experiences initially being distracting, perplexing, and confusing may indeed acquire significance for the students’ possibilities of coping with the main purpose of the activity but that (b) the outcome is highly contingent on the particular experiences drawn upon by the students to cope with the distractions. Consequently, I discuss ways in which teachers may turn distractions encountered in laboratory activities into educative experiences for more than a few lucky students.

The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate the idea behind the notion of mangling as part of the empirical development of didactic models. Didactic models range from macro theories concerned with the selection of goals, content, and methods to micro level modelling of individual lessons and students’ performance, and may take various shapes such as schemata, classification patterns, and rationales for didactic action, i.e., for teaching and learning. Didactic modelling consists of three core activities: extraction, mangling, and exemplification. Mangling designates a process of successive and deliberate adaptation of didactic models by applying them in didactic analysis and design in new contexts. We provide an example of mangling of two existing didactic models, the curriculum emphases (Roberts, Science Education, 66(2), 243–260: 1982) and subject foci (Fensham, Development and dilemmas in science education. The Falmer Press: 1988; Östman, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 28(1), 37–55: 1996). These models were initially developed for didactic analysis of science textbooks and national curricula. In this study we show how these models needed to be modified when mangled through a different practice, viz., analyses of actual teaching in science classrooms. Through the mangling process, the models were modified in the following three senses: (1) Their application range was extended, as a result of demonstrating that they could be meaningfully applied to a new context. (2) The conditions for their application needed to be changed, particular by the need for dividing classroom data into workable pieces that could thereafter be analyzed. (3) The application purpose of the two models changed, from analyses of regularities to analyses of variation in meanings offered to students. These modifications testify to the need for mangling of didactic models in different practices, rather than assuming that they may be unproblematically applied across contexts.

Students’ difficulties with learning science have generally been framed in terms of their generalized conceptual knowledge of a science topic as elicited through their explanations of natural phenomena. In this paper, we empirically explore what more goes into giving a scientific account of a natural phenomenon than giving such generalized explanations. We audio-recorded pairs of upper secondary students during lab-work in electrochemistry. We used a situative and pragmatist approach to study learning in action. This approach made it possible to study how the particulars and contingencies of working with a real electrochemical cell went into students’ reasoning. Our results show that students needed to learn to make distinctions, recognize, and name the particulars in encounters with their cell. They also needed to learn what counts as reasonable readings and to deal with quantitative issues and correlations pertaining to their cell. We refer to these additional learning requirements as the students’ taxonomic and measurement interests. Implications for what is involved in giving a scientific account of a natural phenomenon in school are discussed. The study constitutes an attempt to include, in a systematic way, also the particulars and contingencies of actual practice in an account of students’ reasoning in science.

The purpose of this study is to use a comparative approach to scrutinize the common assumption that certain school science activities are theoretical and therefore particularly suited for engaging students with scientific ideas, whereas others are practical and, thus, not equally conducive to engagement with scientific ideas. We compared two school science activities, one (laboratory work) that is commonly regarded as focusing attention on artefacts that may distract students from central science concepts and the other (concept mapping) that is thought to make students focus directly on these concepts. We observed students in either a laboratory activity about real galvanic cells or a concept-mapping activity about idealized galvanic cells. We used a practical epistemology analysis to compare the two activities regarding students' actions towards scientific ideas and artefacts. The comparison revealed that the two activities, despite their alleged differences along the theory–practice scale, primarily resulted in similar student actions. For instance, in both activities, students interacted extensively with artefacts and, to a lesser extent, with scientific ideas. However, only occasionally did students establish any explicit continuity between artefacts and scientific ideas. The findings indicate that some of the problems commonly considered to be unique for school science practical work may indeed be a feature of school science activities more generally.

We explored the potential for addressing nature of science through a historic narrative about disagreement between researchers concerning a socio-scientific issue, incidence of juvenile thyroid cancer following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. The narrative was developed from authentic sources and tested in two cycles. Eight groups of three to four high-school students were audio recorded. Transcripts were analyzed regarding what nature of science emerged in the discussions and what understanding about NOS could be discerned, using three complementary NOS-frameworks (Consensus-NOS, Whole Science-NOS, FRA-NOS). Together, the student groups touched upon 19 different NOS-themes as they tried to make sense of the disagreement related in the narrative. All groups addressed a common core of NOS-themes, most of which were central to the narrative itself, although some themes that were not part of the narrative also emerged. Students displayed a basic understanding of the tentative, empirical, and subjective nature of science together with the role of evidential relevance and completeness of evidence related to the choice of scientific methods. On the other hand, students did not reckon with peer review as a means for establishing knowledge and resolving disagreement. Moreover, although students readily accepted disagreement as a basic property of science, they had difficulty handling this disagreement when coping with the SSI in the narrative. We discuss how the combination of history of science-in-the-making and SSI in narrative form offers opportunities to teach NOS without risking simplified messages of how scientific knowledge develops or how science can be used to address socio-scientific issues.

In this paper we present experiences from a joint collaborative research project which may be described as an encounter between a school science teaching practice and a university science didactics research practice. We provide narratives which demonstrate how the encounter between these two communities of practice interacted to produce hybridization between the two in terms of mutual influences, resulting in the conceptual and practical development of both communities of practice. We argue that what happened in the project suggests one way of reducing the gap between educational research and teaching through the emergence of practices where the roles of teachers and researchers become blurred.

In this presentation we show how a certain critical event contributed to teacher change in a professional development program in a Swedish secondary school. The professional development program was part of a wider research project focusing on how knowledge stemming from science education research can support science teachers’ day-to-day work with improving teaching. We collected video data from thirteen meetings between science education researchers and teachers taking place before and after three teaching cycles. We also video recorded all lessons comprising the three cycles. We employed Clarke and Hollingsworth’s interconnected model of teacher professional growth to analyze what consequences interactions between teachers and researchers had for teacher change. Here, we focus on one aspect of these analyses, viz., the crucial consequences which followed as the researchers took increased responsibility for implementing the newly introduced knowledge in the teachers’ practice. Thus, following an initial stage in which the newly introduced concepts did not have any sustained consequences for the teachers’ practice, the researchers decided to take a considerably higher risk concerning their own contribution in the program. This was done by (a) making explicit commitments regarding the positive consequences of employing the research based knowledge and (b) providing the teachers with thorough analyses and attendant concrete suggestions for how to change practice on the basis of this knowledge. This change in the researchers’ assumption of responsibility for the outcome of the project resulted in distinct teacher change, visible as the teachers (1) acknowledged salient outcomes of the researchers contributions, (2) suddenly took over the new vocabulary and (3) consistently began to employ the knowledge in their own planning, in talk between themselves and the researchers as well as in artifacts such as planning documents. The results have implications for how we view the role of researchers in professional development.

We present analyses of teacher professional growth during collaboration between science teachers and science education researchers, with special focus on how the differential assumption of responsibility between teachers and researchers affected the growth processes. The collaboration centered on a new conceptual framework introduced by the researchers, which aimed at empowering teachers to plan teaching in accordance with perceived purposes. Seven joint planning meetings between teachers and researchers were analyzed, both quantitatively concerning the extent to which the introduced framework became part of the discussions and qualitatively through the interconnected model of teacher professional growth. The collaboration went through three distinct phases characterized by how and the extent to which the teachers made use of the new framework. The change sequences identified in relation to each phase show that teacher recognition of salient outcomes from the framework was important for professional growth to occur. Moreover, our data suggest that this recognition may have been facilitated because the researchers, in initial phases of the collaboration, took increased responsibility for the implementation of the new framework. We conclude that although this differential assumption of responsibility may result in unequal distribution of power between teachers and researchers, it may at the same time mean more equal distribution of concrete work required as well as the inevitable risks associated with pedagogical innovation and introduction of research-based knowledge into science teachers' practice.

Although misconceptions in science have been established in interview studies, their role during the learning process is poorly examined. In this paper we use results from a classroom study to analyze to what extent nonscientific ideas in electrochemistry that students report in interviews enter into their learning in a more authentic setting. We audio recorded talk between eight pairs of Swedish upper secondary students during a practical on electrochemical cells. Learning was operationalized on a discursive level as a description of what students do and say when taking part in an activity. This enabled an analysis of how encounters with misconceptions influenced the development of students’ reasoning, compared to other encounters during the learning experience. Misconceptions did not constrain the development of students’ reasoning. Rather, their reasoning developed in response to the contingencies of the specific situation. When misconceptions were encountered, they appeared as alternatives and questions not actively defended. Sometimes, encounters with these misconceptions were generative of the students’ reasoning. The results indicate that demonstrating misconceptions in interviews is not enough to assume that they interfere with learning in other contexts. Educational implications and future lines of research based on these findings and on the methodology applied are discussed.

Misconceptions are frequently treated as the chief problem to be overcome in science instruction. In this study we examine to what extent misconceptions of electrochemistry identified in interviews enter into students’ reasoning during a practical on electrochemical cells. We recorded talk in eight pairs of upper secondary students, using a practical epistemology analysis to investigate how their reasoning developed. Students established relations connecting to known misconceptions on rather few occasions. In those instances, their reasoning showed a tentative character, consisting of possibilities and questions rather than of conceptions. In none of these cases did relations touching upon misconceptions constrain how they filled central gaps. On the contrary, they contributed to the students reasoning going in the right direction in some instances. We conclude than when studied in action, the role of common misconceptions can be radically different from that assumed by identifying them in interviews or written surveys. Hence, only when studied within an activity can their significance for the learning of a science content be evaluated correctly.

Despite repeated demonstration of students’ nonscientific ideas, the central import for learning ascribed to such misconceptions has been questioned in the literature. In this study, we investigate what role encounters with misconceptions of electrochemistry identified in interviews play for the development of students’ reasoning in an authentic school setting. We audio-recorded talk between eight pairs of upper secondary students during a practical on electrochemistry. To study the role of misconceptions during the learning process, we used an approach that operationalizes learning on a discursive level as a description of what students do and say as part of an activity. We analyzed how encounters with known misconceptions entered into the students’ reasoning, and how these encounters influenced the directions students’ reasoning took. None of the encounters with known misconceptions constrained students’ reasoning or made it go in unwanted directions. In some cases, encountering the misconception worked as a resource for students’ reasoning. Furthermore, the misconceptions appeared as tentative alternatives or as questions rather than being actively maintained and defended. The results indicate that misconceptions recorded in interviews may have different roles in other settings. This may have consequences for how we interpret difficulties in learning science in authentic learning situations.

Systematic descriptions of students’ discursive ways of coping with various school science activities constitute potential resources for teachers in their ongoing interactions with students in the science classroom. In a previous study we showed that in order to give a scientific account of a real electrochemical cell high school students needed to learn how to distinguish and name constituents of the cell as well as to sort out correlations pertaining to the cell. Here we analyze consequences for students’ learning about electrochemical cells of introducing such taxonomic and correlational investigations into conversations between a researcher and single students. The investigations had consequences for (1) students’ ability to frame their explanations, (2) how students connected the macroscopic and submicroscopic levels of chemical representation and (3) students’ possibilities of perceiving what happened in the cell. The results show that problems of producing explanations as well as of connecting levels of chemical representation may be fruitfully dealt with by addressing issues beyond those linked to conceptual difficulties. The study suggests ways in which systematic descriptions of students’ own ways of coping with school science activities may be generalized and incorporated into teachers’ repertoires for action in the science classroom.

In this paper, we study students’ actions in the classroom as a matter of learning to participate in situated practices. We investigate how learning is constituted in two classroom activities commonly regarded as directing students towards manipulating either concrete material or scientific ideas. We audio-recorded pairs of students as they engaged in a common reasoning task about electrochemical cells, either as part of constructing a concept map or working with a real electrochemical cell. In both settings students needed to learn the rules, norms and techniques of the practice as part of their reasoning. This included techniques for attaining an acceptable concept map, or for how to make correct and relevant measures of current and voltage in the electrochemical cell. Students also learned norms for including terms in the concept map, or for distinguishing and naming particulars of the electrochemical cell. Our results show that similarities and differences between two classroom settings can be specified in new ways by studying them as situated practices. How science is taught in the classroom may not primarily be framed as questions about the effectiveness of different methods, but of what students need to learn in order to act competently in different relevant practices.

The extent to which students connect what they do with materials to the relevant scientific ideas has primarily been studied in relation to laboratory work. We compared students’ interactions with curricular materials and scientific ideas in two activities commonly regarded as affording manipulation of either materials (laboratory work) or ideas (concept mapping). Students were audio and video recorded as they engaged in a lab work activity about real electrochemical cells or in a concept mapping activity about idealized cells. We used a practical epistemology analysis to describe how students interacted with ideas and materials in each activity. Students interacted extensively with materials as well as with ideas in both activities. Students used the real electrochemical cell, but never the physical concept map, to further their explanations of how an electrochemical cell works. Students also took additional actions beyond interacting with materials and ideas to further both activities. Primarily, students invoked taxonomic investigations and oriented themselves in the expectations and rules of each activity. Both activities thus afforded the learning of habits of interacting with materials and ideas, although to somewhat different extents and in partly different ways.

In this paper, we analyze the relation between particular, contingent, and general aspects of a school science activity and show how they are intertwined in nontrivial ways as students give explanations for how a real galvanic cell works during conversations with a researcher. The conversations were examined by using practical epistemology analysis, which made it possible to follow students’ meaning making in detail. The analysis revealed interactions between generic explanations of electrochemistry and the distinctions and correlations that were connected to particulars and contingencies of the galvanic cell. Consequences of these interactions amounted to becoming reminded of knowledge one had come across before, being able to connect distinctions of particular features of the cell to generalized chemical explanations, and realizing which aspects may be excluded from the account. The results indicate that learning in science needs to be approached more as a contingent process than as something that progresses along one particular dimension. They show how students appropriate the sociocultural tools of science and how they situate what they learn in both the particular features of the activity and in the relevant science. Hence, there is a need for more inclusive accounts of how students progress toward increased competency in science.

We present an empirically based model for teaching about planning in pre-service science teacher education as part of on-campus courses. Planning is usually taught through the introduction of theoretically based planning models, but these models commonly assume a linear idea of planning that does not match how teachers go about planning. We examined how pre-service middle school science teachers planned a 20-minutes microteaching lesson on sustainable development. Six groups of pre-service teachers' conversations were video recorded, transcribed, and analyzed through practical epistemology analysis and deliberative educational questions, with the aim of extracting empirically based components of a model for teaching about planning. Our results confirm that the pre-service teachers' planning did not constitute a linear process. However, it still had certain regularities. In particular, all components of the planning model reappeared frequently, but were successively dealt with in new ways. Moreover, the pre-service teachers dealt with aspects of planning beyond those of the original model. These aspects concerned questions about (1) planning rules, (2) inauthenticity and (3) sources. We interpreted these aspects as additional components which, together with the original planning model, may constitute the beginnings of a general model for how to teach about planning in science teacher education.

We present an empirically based model for modeling the quality of pre-service teacher reflection. Conversations from twelve groups of a total of 47 pre-service teachers were video recorded and transcribed verbatim. First, we analyzed their conversations through practical epistemology analysis and an operationalization of Dewey’s definition of reflection to identify the moments of reflection that appeared in the pre-service teachers’ talk. Thereafter, we employed Dewey’s reflective attitudes, responsibility, open-mindedness and whole-heartedness, with the aim of understanding their roles in moments of reflection and how they relate to the quality of reflection. Our results show that the reflective attitudes played different roles and based on these roles and on particular patterns of the attitudes in our data it was possible to use them for modeling the quality of the pre-service teachers’ reflection. We suggest that presence of all of the attitudes corresponds to higher quality than absence of any of them. Moreover, identifying absence of one or more attitudes in PSTs’ reflection makes it possible to explicitly talk about what aspects of the reflection that should be improved, and why. Our results contribute with a first tentative model which may support teacher educators work with the development of pre-service teachers’ reflective practice. 

Although microteaching is a common approach to engaging preservice teachers in reflection on teaching in on-campus courses, this reflection is usually carried out as a separate part. We examined how preservice middle school science teachers reflected amid planning a 20-min microteaching unit on sustainable development. Six groups of preservice teachers were video recorded and their conversations transcribed. We used practical epistemology analysis to analyze moments of reflection in these conversations. The preservice science teachers recurrently engaged in reflection in the course of their planning, which led to changes in perspective concerning important aspects of how to plan teaching that may be considered central for preservice science teachers to learn during their teacher education. Preservice teachers’ reflection was related to the openness of the task, as they had to make decisions about many different aspects of their teaching. Even aspects that are not on the table in a real-world setting, for instance having the possibility of deciding on the age of the target students, led to productive reflection and opportunities for learning. Our results contribute to increased awareness of the possibilities of microteaching for facilitating learning during planning. This may provide science teacher educators with better possibilities of supporting their preservice science teachers’ reflective practice.

This study explores first-year university students' reasoning as they learn to draw Lewis structures. We also present a theoretical account of the formal procedure commonly taught for drawing these structures. Students' discussions during problem-solving activities were video recorded and detailed analyses of the discussions were made through the use of practical epistemology analysis (PEA). Our results show that the formal procedure was central for drawing Lewis structures, but its use varied depending on situational aspects. Commonly, the use of individual steps of the formal procedure was contingent on experiences of chemical structures, and other information such as the characteristics of the problem given. The analysis revealed a number of patterns in how students constructed, checked and modified the structure in relation to the formal procedure and the situational aspects. We suggest that explicitly teaching the formal procedure as a process of constructing, checking and modifying might be helpful for students learning to draw Lewis structures. By doing so, the students may learn to check the accuracy of the generated structure not only in relation to the octet rule and formal charge, but also to other experiences that are not explicitly included in the formal procedure.

In the current debate, there is no consensus on the relationship between knowledge and values in students’ reasoning and argumentation in socio-scientific and sustainability issues, i.e. if these should be addressed as separate entities or rather treated as a whole. In this study, we address this question empirically, with students engaging in two language games–aesthetic and epistemological–as they deliberate on ethical issues associated with genetic engineering. The study reports on a course unit that includes lectures, group work and student-led value-clarification exercises. The ways in which the language games interact were analysed using the established methods of Practical Epistemology Analysis (PEA) and analysis of Deliberative Educational Questions (DEQ). Our results show that aesthetic and epistemological language games were intricately intertwined in the students’ reasoning. Given this close entanglement, each language game was conducive to the development of the other and in so doing, deepened the understanding of the content as a whole.

This article addresses the problem of treating generalizations of human activity as entities and structures that ultimately explain the activities from which they were initially drawn. This is problematic because it involves a circular reasoning leading to unwarranted claims explaining the originally studied activities of science teaching and learning. Unlike other fields within social science research, this problem has not been appreciated and discussed in the science education literature and the field thus needs to be reminded of it. A heuristic specifically developed for the purposes of this article is applied to two examples taken from a much-cited research in the field. Through the examples it is argued that the practice of creating entities out of generalizations of science classroom activities leads to a number of unintended consequences. It is further argued that the stated purposes in the two example articleswould actually have been better served by investigating the entire processes through which the activities develop, as well as how the activities may change through teaching. The article concludes that through the search for explanations caused by underlying entities, science education research runs a risk of alienating its results from the activities from which it initially wanted to meliorate.

The development of professional identity during a short-track teacher education program is studied. This article presents how individuals with a strong background in natural sciences describe the teacher education in which they participate. Individual interviews were conducted with 6 student teachers with a doctorate in natural sciences and extensive work experience in science-related professions on 5 occasions during their teacher education. We suggest that shared ways of talking about education and teaching practice can be described as phases summed up as cautiously positive, rejection, acceptance, and complexity. It is argued that problems of development of professional identities can be understood in relation to the design of the teacher education under study, and failure to acknowledge the development of a professional identity as a science teacher among these student teachers is a question of a not unproblematic transformation of professional identities. Implications for teacher education are that the design of teacher education needs to consider a joint frame for the entire education, in particular the relation between practice and theoretical courses.

Research is needed to explain in more depth what happens and why in teacher-researcher collaboration. Previous research on collaboration points out issues such as asymmetric power relations and cultural differences between professions that can potentially cause problems. This paper examines a Swedish action research project in which teachers and researchers worked together to write a textbook for pre-service teacher education. To study the collaboration, theory on recognition was used to interpret how teachers and, to some extent, researchers understand and value themselves and each other's participation and contribution. Data was collected from a two-day dialogue meeting in the middle of the process where teachers and researchers met to discuss their on-going writing. The result shows that, through well-structured dialogues, the participants transformed their understanding and valuing of both themselves and others in relation to the task of producing new didactical knowledge. This is interpreted as transformed self-recognition for the teachers, who started to acknowledge themselves as knowledge producers. This transformation was crucial for developing the mutual recognition through which new didactical knowledge emerged as a result of the collaboration.

In this paper we present a way to study science learning on a discursive level in a teaching activity designed for a museum of natural history. We used here an analysis of practical epistemologies. The method, which allows a description of students' meaning making in socially shared practices, has been used previously to analyze learning in various school practices. The data presented in this study proceeded from a videotaped activity of the educational program for student teachers at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm. The activity utilizes a variety of dioramas with preserved animals in scenes that reproduce their natural environments and behaviors. In small groups, and without the help of exhibition text, student teachers discuss, interpret, and explain the different scenes displayed in the dioramas. Through the analytical framework used in this study, we are able to study people's meaning making through the development of their discourse in encounters with the diorama and with their previous experiences. We suggest that this approach offers a practical and useful way to describe and analyze people's actions in informal learning settings.

The use of dioramas in educational activities at the museum provides exceptional opportunities for students’ learning. In this study, we present a detailed analysis of student teachers’ moment-by-moment learning during a teaching activity in a museum of natural history. Specifically, we focused on the content and the direction learning takes in response to what students notice in a diorama. Data comes from the videotaped conversations of ten student teacher groups of encounters with a diorama representing a natural scene of animal behaviour. Using analysis of practical epistemologies, the students’ talk was segmented and examined for different themes emerging during the activity. The ten students’ conversations elicited during the activity were, on average 12 min long, with 15 different themes evolving in the conversations. Surprisingly, the most common theme engaged in by the students was not the most related to the curatorial intention of the diorama. Even though each conversation developed differently, it was possible to identify certain temporal patterns in the order that themes appeared. When examining the relationship between the different themes in the conversation, our results showed that the relationship established to certain details of the diorama helped the students significantly to go further with the conversation and the process of meaning-making. Furthermore, teacher’s intervention was important when details of the diorama were not noticed spontaneously by the students.

In this presentation we show how the usefulness and value of a theoretical framework for planning, assessing, and modifying teaching were noticed by teachers in a science teacher professional development project.  The framework, called organizing purposes (Johansson & Wickman, 2011, Wickman & Ligozat, 2010), was introduced by the researchers at the beginning of two-year collaboration.  Data for this presentation comes from two cycles of teaching of a unit on the chemistry of food and human nutrition. We made video recordings of planning meetings between researchers and teachers, classroom teaching, and teachers’ reflections at the end of the cycle.  One of the teachers was interviewed two years after the end of the project. We used Clarke and Hollingsworth’s interconnected model of teacher professional growth to analyze how change in the domain of consequence (salient outcomes) was realized during the collaboration. Change in the domain of consequence, observed through the salient outcomes noticed by the teachers, occurred through the following sequence: (1) anticipation of particular benefits of the framework as a resource for assessing and modifying teaching, (2) recognition of actual student behavior i.e. a dramatic increase of student participation in the equivalent lesson of the second cycle, and (3) reflection on the framework’s role in one’s own practice. It may be significant that the first salient outcome that the teachers noticed was a consequence of the researchers using the framework to suggest concrete changes in teaching for cycle 2. Implications of this feature, and the observed sequence in general, will be discussed at the presentation.

In this presentation we address the issue of how teachers appropriate new concepts emerging from science education research, and how their use is transformed in actual teacher practice. We introduced the newly developed concept of organizing purposes (Wickman & Ligozat, 2010) as a tool for helping teachers plan for and assess student progression during science lessons. We video recorded meetings between teachers and researchers. Meetings concerned introducing the new concepts to the teachers and subsequently use them for planning and assessment of a teaching unit on the chemistry of food. We also video recorded all lessons, and used the introduced concepts also to jointly reflect on what happened during lessons. The results clearly show that the use of the concepts of organizing purposes and other aspects of the theoretical framework presented by the researchers was not fully adopted by the teachers until they were set in action in concrete classroom contexts. It was also important for the teachers’ engagement to recognize that changes proposed in their teaching practice improved some salient outcomes in the students. The results provide detailed insight into the mechanisms by which school science practice is slowly transformed as new concepts from research are introduced.

Socioscientific issues (SSI) concern social issues, often lacking simple solutions, that relate to science and often also risk controversies. SSIs have become an established part of science education, aiming to teach students not only about content knowledge but also about the nature of science and to offer them practice in argumentation and decision making. We performed a scoping review of the literature on SSI in science education research, in order to investigate if the topics covered would lean themselves to education about risk, and if risk is raised in these works. Using Web of Science we identified 296 empirical publications and 91 theoretical or review publications about SSI teaching in science education. The empirical publications covered studies performed in primary to tertiary school, most commonly upper secondary school (32%). The most frequently taught SSI themes were nature conservation, biotechnology, and climate change. Despite that these, as most of the other identified themes, clearly are connected to risk analysis and risk management, few publications raised the concept of risk and the methods of risk analysis. In fact, almost half (empirical: 48%, theoretical: 49%) did not mention risk at all. We argue that SSIs present an opportunity for risk researchers to engage with educators to incorporate risk in school science education and to contribute in developing teaching materials suitable toward that aim.

The present paper takes its point of departure in risk being a relevant content for science education, and that there are many different approaches to how to incorporate it. By reviewing the academic literature on the use and definitions of risk from fields such as engineering, linguistics and philosophy, we identified key elements of the risk concept relevant for science education. Risk is a phenomenon of the future that may be conveyed by our activity, it is something that may or may not take place. Hence, at the core of risk we find uncertainty and consequence. Furthermore, the elements of probability and severity are relevant modifiers of the consequence, as well as both subject to uncertainty. Additionally, in framing, understanding and decision-making on risk, as individuals or society, we need to acknowledge that risk has both objective and subjective components, lying in the interface between knowledge and values. In this paper, we describe how these key elements were derived from the literature and derive a schematic model of the risk concept for the purpose of science education. We further discuss how this model may assist in planning, execution and evaluation of teaching activities explicitly or implicitly involving risk issues.

In continental Europe didactics is identified as the professional science of teachers. A central concern of didactics is not only to deliver teaching methods for teachers and teacher education, but also to develop analytical units, analytical methods and design principles that are useful for teachers in making decisions on planning, carrying out and assessing teaching and learning. Didactic research provides rationales and conceptual schemata for choosing certain content and for choosing appropriate methods to teach that content with specific groups of students. We give a methodological account of a central field in didactics, namely didactic modelling, analysis and design. We review what didactic models are and how they can be produced. We describe the methodologies of modelling, namely (1) how models can be extracted from classroom data in conjunction with theory, (2) how extracted models need to be mangled with teachers, that is adapting models to make them more useful practically, and (3) procedures of collecting exemplars to illustrate how models can be used with various content and students. We also explain how extracted and mangled didactic models can be used for analysing teaching and learning, and for educational designs.

Didactics and didactic models in science education

This article reviews what didactic models are, how they can be produced through didactic modelling and how didactic models can be used for analyses of teaching and learning and for educational designs. The article is as an introduction to this Nordina special issue on didactic models and didactic modelling in science education research.

The levels of stochastic health effects following exposure to low doses of ionising radiation are not well known. A consequence of the uncertainty is that any radiation exposure is met with deep concernboth by the public and by scientists who disagree about how the partly conflicting results from low-dose studies should be interpreted. The concern is not limited to ionising radiation but is inherent to other areas of modern technologies such as biotechnology or electromagnetic fields. The everyday presence of advanced technologies confronts people with the necessity to take decisions and there is an ongoing debate regarding both the nature and magnitude of potential risks and how education efforts may empower peoples ' decision-making. In the field of radiation research there are different opinions regarding the optimal education methods, spanning from the idea that peoples' fears will be eliminated by introducing dose thresholds below which the risk is assumed to be zero, to suggestions of concentrating research efforts in an attempt to eliminate all uncertainties regarding the effects of low doses. The aim of this paper was to present our approach which is based on developing an education program at the secondary school level where students learn to understand the role of science in society. Teaching about radiation risk as a socio-scientific issue is not based on presenting facts but on showing risks in a broader perspective aiming at developing students' competency in making decisions based on informed assessment. We hope to stimulate and encourage other researchers to pursue similar approaches.