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Meaningful technology education is far more than learning how to use technology. It entails an understanding of the nature of technology--what technology is, how and why technology is developed, how individuals and society direct, react to, and are sometimes unwittingly changed by technology. This book places these and other issues regarding the nature of technology in the context of learning, teaching and schooling. The nature of technology and its impact on education must become a significant object of inquiry among educators. This book is intended to stimulate thinking and action among teachers, teacher educators, and education researchers.

This article provides a description of science teacher education policy in Canada and the USA. We focus on qualifications and procedures to obtain an initial teaching license, requirements for license renewal, and trends in our respective countries. In both countries, science teacher education is the responsibility of the province or state, rather than the federal government. Because these countries are composed of many provinces/states, each with its own unique characteristics, we focus on general trends, recognizing that exceptions to these trends exist. Our review indicates that science teacher education in Canada and the USA consists of a highly diverse array of licenses, requirements, and programs. While this variability provides flexibility for programs to meet local needs and to create innovative programs, it also creates the potential for teachers to enter classrooms with insufficient preparation. In both countries, multiple pathways lead to certification, many of which have very few science content or science pedagogy requirements. The science content knowledge required of elementary teachers is of concern in both countries. Secondary science teachers have multiple ways to teach with insufficient preparation in science content and pedagogy. The nature of science is notably absent from most science teacher education state and provincial requirements. Innovative program structures with high requirements for science content and pedagogy exist in both countries. Research is needed that compares program structures and requirements to determine their relative impact on teachers' practices. Additionally, much remains to be done to improve the extent to which existing research influences policy.

This editorial examines significant deleterious issues that have emerged unchecked, and seemingly embraced unwittingly, by the greater science education community, the public at-large, and even segments of the international science education community. Their claims are grounded in three main cases that are distinct, yet intertwined with one another. Collectively, they serve as a warning shot across the bow of those disregarding the sociocultural roots of education. Left unchecked, the issues the authors raise may at best deny a progressive understanding of schooling, or at worst, contribute to a kind of dominant subjective educational hegemony. In the first case, they claim that the science education community has been largely remiss in its uncritical adoration of engineering and the inclusion of engineering concepts and practices in the science curriculum. In their second case, they suggest that while many may view technological literacy as a neutral construct focused primarily on how to use technology, the economic interest of business and policymakers helps to maintain power inequities and wrongly defines technological literacy, including media literacy almost entirely in terms of how technology and media are to be consumed. In the third case, the authors posit that the current bandwagons containing hedgmonic initiatives that promote analytic skills and logical reasoning do so while unwittingly overlooking the crucial role of compassion, emotive reasoning, reflexive reasoning, perspective taking (expressed in its ideal form as empathy) and conscience. They point to the missed opportunity of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) to capture these latter sociocultural progressive elements in how it fails to situates qualities of socioscientific issues (SSI) and nature of science (NOS) that are central in cleaving residual components of the fact-value distinction of vestigial positivistic traditions.

The assertion that general reform-based science teaching practices (GRBSTPs) can facilitate nature of science (NOS) instruction has been mentioned in the literature, but rigorous and transparent empirical substantiation for this claim has not been made. This investigation empirically demonstrates an association between thirteen experienced teachers' NOS implementation practices and their GRBSTPs. While effectively implementing GRBSTPs does not ensure the NOS will be taught, the findings show that these practices are associated with high levels of NOS instruction. In this study, teachers who implemented higher levels of reform-based practices were also observed to enact more instances of planned and spontaneous effective NOS instruction. Furthermore, these teachers were more likely to recognize and capitalize on NOS teaching opportunities when they unexpectedly arose in the context of their GRBSTPs. Just as NOS understanding must be assessed when determining factors associated with teachers' NOS implementation, teachers' GRBSTPs should also be empirically and transparently established to ensure they do not mask or confound other factors associated with NOS implementation.

Background Misconceptions about biological evolution specifically and the nature of science in general are pervasive in our society and culture. The view that biological evolution explains life’s origin(s) and that hypotheses become theories, which then become laws are just two examples of commonly held misconceptions. These misconceptions are reinforced in the media, in people’s personal lives, and in some unfortunate cases in the science classroom. Misconceptions regarding the nature of science (NOS) have been shown to be related to understanding and acceptance of biological evolution. Previous work has looked at several factors that are related to an individual’s understanding of biological evolution, acceptance of biological evolution, and his/her understanding of the NOS. The study presented here investigated understanding and acceptance of biological evolution among a highly educated population: university faculty. Methods To investigate these variables we surveyed 309 faculty at a major public Midwestern university. The questions at the core of our investigation covered differences across and between faculty disciplines, what influence theistic position or other demographic responses had, and what model best described the relationships detected. Results Our results show that knowledge of biological evolution and acceptance of biological evolution are positively correlated for university faculty. Higher knowledge of biological evolution positively correlates with higher acceptance of biological evolution across the entire population of university faculty. This positive correlation is also present if the population is broken down into distinct theistic views (creationist and non-creationist viewpoints). Greater knowledge of biological evolution also positively correlates with greater acceptance of biological evolution across different levels of science education. We also found that of the factors we examined, theistic view has the strongest relationship with knowledge and acceptance of biological evolution. Conclusions These results add support to the idea that a person’s theistic view is a driving force behind his or her resistance to understanding and accepting biological evolution. We also conclude that our results support the idea that effective science instruction can have a positive effect on both understanding and acceptance of biological evolution and that understanding and acceptance are closely tied variables.

Biology teachers should include the study of evolution in their curricula, presenting it as a widely accepted scientific theory. While creationism has no place in the science classroom, teachers should be respectful of students' beliefs. Students should be encouraged to understand the science underlying the theory of evolution, and they must also realize that evolution does not explain the origin of life. This approach may reduce any resistance students have to studying evolution.

The propagation of misconceptions about the theory of biological evolution must be addressed whenever and wherever they are encountered. The recent article by Paz-y-Mino and Espinoza in this journal contained several such misconceptions, including: that biological evolution explains the origin of life, confusion between biological and cosmological evolution, and the use of the term “Darwinism,” all of which we address here. We argue that science educators, and biology educators particularly, must be aware of these (and other) misconceptions and work to remove them from their classrooms.

Understanding the nature of science (NOS)--what science is and how it works, the assumptions that underlie scientific knowledge, how scientists function as a social group, and how society impacts and reacts to science--is prominent in science education reform documents (Rutherford and Ahlgren 1990; AAAS 1993; McComas and Olson 1998; NRC 1996; AAAS 2001) and state science standards (McComas, Lee, and Sweeney 2009). The preamble to NSTA's (2000) position statement on NOS begins by asserting that \"all those involved with science teaching and learning should have a common, accurate view of the nature of science.\" This article illustrates how to accurately and effectively teach NOS as part of everyday science instruction. (Contains 6 figures.)