Where are we? A contribution to a better understanding of the state of the art ...

• Author(s): Paixão, Fátima ; Lopes, Bernardino ; Praia, João ; Guerra, Cecília ; Cachapuz, António
• Date: 2008
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.11/1300
• Origin: Repositório Científico do Instituto Politécnico de Castelo Branco
• Subject(s): Science education; Research; Content analysis
• Document Type: Article
• Language: English

Description

The purpose of this study is to add our efforts to those of researchers who have been concerned with a better understanding of the state of the art in Science Education Research (SER). The study focuses on the nature and evolution of the main SER lines, e.g. ,what researchers actually do when they enter the research community in order to develop Science Education. We believe that the exercise may help to reinforce the identity of SER, to gain a better knowledge of the field, and to make some educational proposals for mid-term priorities, in short, to foster the advance of Science Education knowledge. The corpus of the study was formed by the 152 most influential SER papers published from 1993 to 2002. Two criteria were used to select the papers: they had to be published in three of the most important international research journals, plus a criterion based on the citation index. Content analysis of the corpus indicates that Concept-Learning-oriented studies tend to make way for studies emphasising the role of the Philosophy of Science and also for multidisciplinary approaches such as STS. Thoughts for the development of the research field are put forward.