Many authors stress the importance of basing teaching on students' prior knowledge. To build a bridge between students' everyday knowledge and scientific concepts, the role of metaphors and analogies came into the focus of the science education community during the past two decades. Approaches using metaphor‐based teaching strategies often regard metaphors and analogies as teaching tools that can be adopted by a teacher. On the basis of the theoretical framework of experientialism, we argue that not only teaching but also thinking about and understanding science without metaphors and analogies is not possible. An analysis of studies dealing with metaphors and analogies in science education shows that instructional analogies and metaphors are often not understood as intended or not used by students in their own explanations. By reanalyzing 199 instructional metaphors and analogies on the basis of a metaphor analysis, we show that it takes more than making a connection to everyday life to communicate science fruitfully. We show that good instructional metaphors and analogies need embodied sources. These embodied sources are everyday experiences conceptualized in, for example, schemata such as containers, paths, balances, and up and down. For the analysis, we introduce the concept of conceptual metaphors for analyzing metaphors as well as analogies. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 96:849–877, 2012

In recent years, researchers have become aware of the experiential grounding of scientific thought. Accordingly, research has shown that metaphorical mappings between experience-based source domains and abstract target domains are omnipresent in everyday and scientific language. The theory of conceptual metaphor explains these findings based on the assumption that understanding is embodied. Embodied understanding arises from recurrent bodily and social experience with our environment. As our perception is adapted to a medium-scale dimension, our embodied conceptions originate from this mesocosmic scale. With respect to this epistemological principle, we distinguish between micro-, meso-and macrocosmic phenomena. We use these insights to analyse how external representations of phenomena in the micro-and macrocosm can foster learning when they (a) address the students' learning demand by affording a mesocosmic experience or (b) assist reflection on embodied conceptions by representing their image schematic structure. We base our considerations on empirical evidence from teaching experiments on phenomena from the microcosm (microbial growth and signal conduction in neurons) and the macrocosm (greenhouse effect and carbon cycle). We discuss how the theory of conceptual metaphor can inform the development of external representations.

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