Programs for the reform of K-12 science teaching today usually insist that science teachers must introduce their students to the nature of science, as well as to scientific content. The academic field of science studies, however, evinces no consensus about what the nature of science really is. This article examines how science educators and educational researchers have drawn on the fragmented teachings of science studies about the nature of science, and how they have used those teachings as a resource in (...) their own projects. It identifies three competing movements for the reform of science teaching that owe a particular debt to science studies: history and philosophy of science, science, technology, and society, and constructivist pedagogy. The article analyzes some of the deep assumptions about the relationships between research science, school science, and children’s learning that pervade the educational literature. (shrink)

Agnieszka Olechnicka et al. have nicely documented developments in the internationalization of science and collaboration which raise important broader question. The traditional view, elaborated by Michael Polanyi, was that the transmission of science at the level of discaverers required personal contact, which normally inovolve time spent in laboratories of famous scientists, and hands-on experience with experiments and close interaction with collegues, which in turn implied a few international centres. Has this changed through digitalization and the internet? One change is the (...) increase in teamwork and the size and physical distribution of research teams, the outsourcing to the larger world of "open science", as well as novel forms of funding of collaboration, which creates the need for new arrangements for patents and credit. The huge size of the grant system and other funding for science from discovery and internal competition to "impact", which has inevitable effects on quality and the life-world orientation of scientists. Whether this has improved science is an open question: it has radically changed it. (shrink)