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The paper reports about the outcome of a systematic review of research on family resemblance approach (FRA) to nature of science in (NOS) science education. FRA is a relatively recent perspective on NOS being a system of cognitive-epistemic and social-institutional aspects of science. FRA thus consists of a set of categories such as aims and values, practices, knowledge and social organizations in relation to NOS. Since the introduction of the FRA, there has been increasing interest in investigations about how FRA can be of use in science education both empirically and practically. A journal content analysis was conducted in order to investigate which FRA categories are covered in journal articles and to identify the characteristics of the studies that have used FRA. These characteristics included the target level of education and focus on pre- or in-service teachers. Furthermore, epistemic network analysis of theoretical and empirical papers was conducted to determine the extent to which the studies incorporated various key themes about FRA, such as its transferability to other domains and differentiation of the social-institutional system categories. The findings illustrate an increasing number of empirical studies using FRA in recent years and broad coverage in science education. Although the social-institutional system categories included intraconnections, these were not as strong as those intraconnections among categories within the cognitive-epistemic system. Future research directions for the use of FRA in K-12 science education are discussed.

The family resemblance approach to nature of science is receiving increasing attention by science educators since its inception about a decade ago. Many scholars of science education have contributed and continue to contribute to it not only theoretically but also by applying it empirically to a wide range of areas such as curriculum and textbook analyses, pre-service teacher training, undergraduate teaching and, STEM education. This article aims to develop the family resemblance approach further. We do this in several ways. First, we clarify its foundations in a way to reveal that it provides not only a domain-specific, but at the same time a domain-general conceptualization of nature of science. Second, we expand the structure of science as a social institution by adding a new category to it, i.e., the reward system, and justify it. Third, we show that two of the most common elements of the category “practices,” namely, observation and experimentation, display the character of family resemblance. Then, we explore this for methods and values in science. Finally, we discuss the possibility of a rapprochement between the family resemblance approach and the consensus view.

The paper reports an empirical study on the relationship between middle school students’ understanding of nature of science (NOS) and their metacognitive awareness. The reconceptualised family resemblance approach to the nature of science (RFN) (Erduran & Dagher, 2014 ; Kaya & Erduran, 2016 ) as a holistic framework that covers science as epistemic-cognitive and social system guided the study. A total of 701 students (180 5 th , 167 6 th , 170 7 th , and 184 8 th grade) and 3 students from each grade level (in total 12 students) who have low, moderate, high-RFN understanding, and metacognitive awareness levels were interviewed. The data sources are the “RFN Student Questionnaire,” “Metacognitive Awareness Inventory for Children,” and interviews. The data was analyzed with Pearson product-moment and thematic analysis. The results indicated that there is a statistically positive relationship between middle school students’ RFN understanding and their metacognitive awareness. Furthermore, the results of the interviews showed that students’ responses to RFN and metacognitive awareness questions were aligned and compatible. The students with high metacognitive awareness had higher RFN understanding and those with lower metacognitive awareness had lower RFN understanding. This relationship was evident for each grade level student separately as well. The study opens a new study area in terms of the use of metacognitive strategies in RFN-enriched lessons for experimental and causal-comparative designs. The teacher education programs or curriculum studies can consider utilization of metacognitive prompts in NOS teaching.

Studies on the quality of nature of science (NOS) representations in school science textbooks report them being mostly of implicit manner and not fully adequate. However, the often underlying NOS framework of the consensus list in these studies is criticized as undifferentiated and inadequate. The family resemblance approach (FRA) to NOS shows potential to give differentiated insights into the appropriateness of NOS representations with avoidance of specifying certain philosophical directions. Based on a fine-grained differentiated FRA category system (11 main categories, e.g., “knowledge”; 52 subcategories, e.g., “hypotheses”), the quality of cognitive-epistemic NOS representations identified in seven biology school textbooks from Germany was analyzed. For this, a category system was developed. Cognitive-epistemic NOS representations in four chapters of each of the seven textbooks were evaluated regarding manner (implicit, explicit) and adequacy (adequate, (partly) not adequate). Results indicate, among others, that explicit representations of the cognitive-epistemic system of science were mainly placed in the introduction chapters, whereas subject-related chapters include mostly implicit representations. In this article, we present the evaluation of the quality of cognitive-epistemic NOS representations and discuss implications for science education.

There is a growing application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in K-12 science classrooms. In K-12 education, students harness AI technologies to acquire scientific knowledge, ranging from automated personalized virtual scientific inquiry to generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Sora, and Google Bard. These AI technologies inherit various strengths and limitations in facilitating students’ engagement in scientific activities. There is a lack of framework to develop K-12 students’ epistemic considerations of the interaction between the disciplines of AI and science when they engage in producing, revising, and critiquing scientific knowledge using AI technologies. To accomplish this, we conducted a systematic review for studies that implemented AI technologies in science education. Employing the family resemblance approach as our analytical framework, we examined epistemic insights into relationships between science and AI documented in the literature. Our analysis centered on five distinct categories: aims and values, methods, practices, knowledge, and social–institutional aspects. Notably, we found that only three studies mentioned epistemic insights concerning the interplay between scientific knowledge and AI knowledge. Building upon these findings, we propose a unifying framework that can guide future empirical studies, focusing on three key elements: (a) AI’s application in science and (b) the similarities and (c) differences in epistemological approaches between science and AI. We then conclude our study by proposing a development trajectory for K-12 students’ learning of AI-science epistemic insights.

In primary and secondary schools, the disciplines encompassed in “STEM”—Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics—have usually been studied as separate subjects, with little effort directed towards non-anecdotal integration. “Integrated STEM education” is one of the most recent interdisciplinary proposals and, under its umbrella, school disciplines are beginning to be integrated in an educationally fruitful way. STEM as a renovated approach is gaining ground, despite the infancy of its philosophical analysis. Explicit epistemological discussion of integrated STEM proposals is either absent or blurred. The overall aim of this paper is therefore to establish an initial framework for philosophical discussion, to help analyse the aims and discourse of integrated STEM education, and consider the implications that adopting any particular epistemological view might have on the aims for general education, and on the construction of science curricula oriented towards citizenship and social justice. We envisage humanist values for integrated STEM education and, after revisiting the currently proposed relationships between the STEM knowledge areas, we adopt a model of a “seamless web” for such relationships that is coherent with humanist values. A few issues emerging from this model are addressed through the lens of the so-called “family resemblance approach”, a framework from the field of research on the nature of science, in order to identify some potential central features of “nature of STEM”.

Reconceptualized Family Resemblance Approach to Nature of Science (RFN) explains science as a cognitive, epistemic, and social institutional system. The aim of this study is to examine the inclusion of Nature of Science (NOS) in the 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grade Turkish middle school science textbooks. The “content,” “activity,” and “assessment” sections of each science textbook were traced based on RFN categories which are “aims and values (AV),” “scientific practices (SP),” “methods and methodological rules (M),” “scientific knowledge (SK),” and “social institutional systems (SI)” through content analysis. As a result, the total frequency value of the codes regarding RFN categories was found to be 196 in the 5th grade, 548 in the 6th grade, 284 in the 7th grade, and 427 in the 8th grade science textbooks. Most references to NOS were found in the “activity” sections of the textbooks. Although there are some references to NOS in each textbook, some of the RFN categories in the whole textbooks are missing. Furthermore, a consistent progression for the frequency of NOS related keywords was not found throughout the grade levels. In conclusion, there is a need to integrate NOS into science textbooks holistically and in a balanced way to provide a vertical articulation throughout the grade levels.

The notion of family resemblance has recently emerged as a promising and fruitful approach to characterising the nature of science (NOS) in science education research, offering solutions to some perplexing challenges such as capturing both the domain-general and domain-specific features of science with a single framework. At the same time, however, criticism has been levelled that the resemblance might eventually extend to certain activities that are not scientific but pose as science. This would be an undesirable consequence for science educators, particularly given the increasing need for individuals to discern pseudoscientific claims circulated on social media from scientific information. Many pseudoscientific and non-scientific activities resemble science in terms of their aim to explain nature, their use of evidence-based methods, and their interrelation with politics and society. In this theoretical article, we build on the concept of family resemblance to consider how it can simultaneously explain the diversity and unity of science and help students to learn about the nature of science and that of pseudoscience in science education. We put forward three principles that can guide teaching about pseudoscience based on the family resemblance conceptualisation of science.

For many years, hegemonic approaches to teaching the nature of science (NOS) have focused mainly on understanding some epistemic (i.e., rational, or cognitive) aspects involved in the construction of science. So, aspects of a non-epistemic (i.e., non-rational, contextual, or extra-scientific) nature have been practically neglected in these predominant proposals for teaching NOS. However, those of us who advocate a more holistic NOS teaching, with a balanced integration of both epistemic and non-epistemic aspects of NOS, have reason to celebrate. The development of the family resemblance approach (FRA) to NOS, initially proposed by Irzik and Nola (2011, 2014), and then suitably adapted by Erduran and Dagher (2014) for science education, has cemented such a purpose in the current literature on NOS teaching research. But, like all scientific milestones, there are antecedents that, in some way, have also contributed to building the path that has brought us to this point. Therefore, it is fair to acknowledge them. Thus, the aim of this article is to provide a critical discussion of all of this and to make an explicit acknowledgement of some of these antecedents, such as the framework of the science-technology-society (STS) tradition, among others, without undermining the important role of the FRA in achieving the current predominant vision of holistic NOS teaching.