Much has been written about how effective nature of science instruction must have a significant explicit and reflective character. However, while explicitly drawing students' attention to NOS issues is crucial, learning and teaching the NOS are essentially matters of conceptual change. In this article, how people learn and learners' responses to the demands of conceptual change are used to explain how students may exit from instruction with fundamental NOS misconceptions left intact or only slightly altered, despite being explicitly and reflectively attended to more accurate ideas. The purpose of this concept paper is to set within a theoretical framework of learning, and bring some coherence to, what has rapidly become a large body of empirical research regarding effective NOS instruction. Toward these two ends, this article: (1) illustrates how a conceptual change framework can be used to account for learners' responses to NOS instruction and what teachers might do to promote understanding NOS and transferring it to new contexts; (2) characterizes popularly advocated NOS instructional approaches along a continuum marked by increasing connection to the workings of science, and decreased ability to dismiss NOS lessons as extraneous to authentic science; and (3) proposes that NOS instruction would likely be more effective if teachers deliberately scaffolded classroom experiences and students' developing NOS understanding back and forth along the continuum.

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Many educators today advocate the use of historical narratives as one of a number of possible contexts for teaching science. However, several pedagogical and epistemological issues arise when implementing narratives in the classroom. In this paper, we are interested in expanding our view of narrative, specific to integrating the history of science and science teaching, and we extend our argument beyond simple anecdotal references to recognise the benefits of the historical narrative in a variety of ways. At the same time, we address pedagogical concerns by broadening perceptions of the manner and contexts in which narratives can be developed so as to include imaginative and manipulative elements that provide interactive experiences for students that are more conducive to implementation by science teachers.Several practical examples are presented as illustrations of historical narratives with imaginative and manipulative elements that by design facilitate a more meaningful implementation in the science classroom.

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Learning and effective teaching are both complicated acts. However, many administrators, teachers, parents, and policymakers appear not to recognize those complexities and their significance for practice. Fueling this perception, recommendations from isolated research findings often neglect the complexities in learning and teaching, and when implemented in classrooms often fall well short of the advertised effect. Consequently, education research is generally ignored, and the resulting research-practice gap raises concerns regarding the utility of university-based teacher education, and education research more generally. However, the strength of education research resides in the synergy resulting from its integration into a unifying system that guides, but does not determine, decision-making. Dewey (1929) argued for teacher decision-making guided by education research, but recently several writers have justly criticized education researchers for not providing comprehensible assistance to educators and policymakers (Good, 2007;Shymansky, 2006;Windschitl, 2005). This paper proposes a decision-making framework for teaching to help beginning and experienced teachers make sense of education research, come to understand crucial teacher decisions, and how those decisions interact to affect student learning. The proposed decision-making framework for teaching has significant utility in the design of science methods courses, science teacher education programs, effective student teacher supervision experiences, and professional development workshops.

In a recent JRST article, Alters (1997) surveyed philosophers of science to determine how much they disagree about the nature of science (NOS). Finding considerable disagreement, he asks how we should teach the NOS if there is no consensus on the matter. We have several concerns with this study and disagree strongly with its conclusions.First, our primary concern is with the design of Alters' survey. The 15 NOS tenet statements included were those most often selected by a panel of philosophers as those "on which they believed philosophers of science would not agree" (p. 43, emphasis added). This procedure clearly stacks the deck to make the disagreement among respondents appear greater than it is. This study therefore does not give a clear picture of how much philosophers of science do agree about the NOS, because the tenets most likely to be uniformly accepted were purposely omitted from the study. Alters' focus on disagreement about the NOS is in fact reminiscent of people who argue about teaching evolution because scientists do not agree about what evolution is and how it works when there is, of course, remarkable agreement about the fundamental concepts in evolutionary theory (although there is disagreement about some peripheral issues.) Second, there are significant problems with the wording of many statements included in the Alters survey. For example, Item 10 states, "Science rests on an assumption that the natural world cannot be altered by a supernatural being" (p. 49). Inclusion of this statement strongly suggests item selection biased against agreement because modern philosophers and scientists almost universally agree that science deals with things in nature and takes no position whatsoever on the "supernatural" (e.g., Shideler, 1966). We suggest that the surprising 42% agreement JOURNAL

With funding from the United States National Science Foundation, 30 historical short stories designed to teach science content and draw students' attention to the nature of science (NOS) have been created for post-secondary introductory astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, and physics courses. The project rationale, story development and structure, and freely available stories at the project website are presented.

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