'Science & Education'

Overview

The journal Science & Education is published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, and is associated with the International History, Philosophy and Science Teaching Group. It commenced publication in 1992.

The journal has ten numbers per volume (1000 pages), each volume covering the calendar year. Subscription is USD85pa (reduced for multiple year subscriptions), and USD42.50 for students, and for scholars from Latin America and former Eastern Bloc European countries. Subscription constitutes membership of the IHPST Group.

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The journal publishes high-quality research that is informed by the history, philosophy and sociology of science, and by considerations from philosophy of education. Contributions range over theoretical, curricular and pedagogical issues in science teaching.

The distinguished Editorial Committee, who review submitted manuscripts, include two past presidents of the US Philosophy of Science Association, two past presidents of the US History of Science Society, three past presidents of the US Philosophy of Education Society, a former president of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, the president of the US Cognitive Science Society, and ten current or former editors of major international research journals in education and in the history and philosophy of science.

Journal on the Web

The journal Science & Education is now available on the web at:
http://springer.com/journal/11191.

Or the articles can be accessed directly at:
http://springerlink.metapress.com/content/1573-1901/

All articles can be downloaded as pdf files for free if the individual's institution subscribes to the relevant Springer journal package; otherwise they can be downloaded for a fee.

Alternatively subscription renewals for printed journals and new subscriptions (USD95 pa, with discount for students, retired faculty and scholars from depressed economies), can be effected on this IHPST website.

The Springer site is now linked to Google, and articles can be searched in Google by typing in author name and first words of title. This goes direct to the Springer site and the pdf file of the article.

Approximately 3,000 institutions around the world have subscribed to the on-line version of the journal, while many institutions have subscriptions to both print and on-line versions.

The on-line version is heavily used. In 2007 there were 37,593 article-downloads from the Springer site; this was a 60% increase over the 23,584 downloads in 2006. These figures make Science & Education one of the most utilised of all Springer education journals.

The web site provides many services to researchers:

Manuscript Submissions

Scholars can submit manuscripts in file form direct to the journal at: www.editorialmanager.com/sced/

Thereafter they can check on its progress through the review process. Most submissions are reviewed by three senior scholars, usually involving a spread of educator, historian, philosopher or cognitive scientist. The submission site also has a guide to the journal's format and style conventions.

Special Issues

Recent contributors

Recent contributors have included:

Contributions are welcome, and can be made directly at www.editorialmanager.com/sced/

Editor: A/Professor Michael R. Matthews, School of Education, University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, Australia. Email: m.matthews@unsw.edu.au

'Science & Education' Style Guidelines and Bibliographic Format

All manuscripts to be published in the journal Science & Education need to conform to the journal's style and bibliographic format. Below is an example of a conforming manuscript. This can be a guide for manuscript preparation.

Please note the following:

Enquiries about the format, submission process and reviewing procedures can be directed to the journal editor:

A/Professor Michael R. Matthews
School of Education
UNSW
Sydney 2052
Australia
email: m.matthews@unsw.edu.au

Sample Manuscript for Style and Format:

Thomas Kuhn's Impact on Science Education: What Lessons can be Learned?

MICHAEL R. MATTHEWS
School of Education, University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, Australia. email: m.matthews@unsw.edu.au

Abstract: Thomas Kuhn has had an impact in all academic fields. In science education, Kuhnian themes are especially noticable in conceptual change research, constructivist theorising, and multicultural education debates. Unfortunately the influence is frequently compromised by resea rchers having a limited understanding of Kuhn's original ideas, little exposure to the tradition of philosophical opposition to Kuhn's theories, and minimal appreciation of how Kuhn progressively qualified his initial 'irrationalist' views of scientific development. One lesson to be learnt is is that the science education community should more seriously and effectively engage with on-going debates and analysis in the history and philosophy of science. This is the same lesson that was learnt from the science education community's wholesale embrace of logical empiricism during the 1950s and 1960s. Another lesson is that there are powerful disciplinary, institutional and sub-cultural barriers that mitigate against science educators seriously engaging with historical and philosophical scholarship

Thomas Kuhn has arguably been the most influential historian of science in the twentieth century. His impact has been felt in all academic fields. By the mid-1990s, his landmark Structure of Scientific Revolutions (first edition 1962, second edition 1970, hereafter SSR) had sold over one million copies in 16 languages. It was the most cited single 20th Century book in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in the period 1976-1983; and even forty years after its publication, as the twentieth century closed, there were 400 references to the book in the 19 99 Social Science Citation Index. Kuhn's epistemology, his account of the nature of science, and especially his views on theory change and incommensurability in the history of science, have been exhaustively examined.

Recognition of Kuhn by Science Educators

After a late start, Kuhn's impact on education, and specifically science education, research was considerable. Kuhnian notions of 'paradigm', 'incommensurability', and 'theory dependence' became the stock-in-trade of most educational researchers. For the most part, science educators interpreted these terms in the prevalent relativistic and anti-realist manner; they did not attempt to give a fallibilist and realist rendering of the terms. Perhaps there is no better example than the influential work of Yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba. In their major publication, Naturalistic Inquiry (Lincoln & Guba 1985), they draw on the work of Hesse, Heron, Patton and a few other writers inspired by Kuhn, to claim that: 'paradigms represent a distillation of what we think about the world (but cannot prove)' (p.15), 'Since all theories and other leading ideas of scientific history have, so far, been shown to be false and unacceptable, so surely will any theories that we expound today' (p.16), 'people are not so much compelled by the logic of a situation as they are persuaded to accept a new set of values É the value shift is crucial; without it, rational movement cannot occur', and, finally,:

There is, in this ontological position, always an infinite number of constructions that might be made and hence there are multiple realities. Any given construction may not be (and almost certainly is not) in a one-to-one relation to (or isomorphic with) other constructions of the same (by definition only) entity. (Lincoln & Guba 1985, pp.83-84)

Kuhn's Recapitulation Thesis

Kuhn popularized Piaget's 'cognitive ontogeny recapitulates scientific phylogeny' thesis among historians and philosophers of science, saying: 'Part of what I know about how to ask questions of dead scientists has been learned by examining Piaget's interrogations of living children.' (Kuhn 1977, p.21). In Structure, Kuhn remarked on how accidental was his discovery of Piaget, saying that 'A footnote encounted by chance led me to the experiments by which Jean Piaget has illuminated both the various worlds of the growing child and the process of transition from one to the next' (Kuh n 1970, p.vi). It is easy to accept that Piaget's view that the conceptual development of children was stage-like, and that it exhibited discontinuities, played a central role in Kuhn's characterisation of scientific development.

How Novel was Kuhn's Philosophical Position?

Kuhn was a key figure in the demise of the long dominant logical empiricist programme in philosophy of science. The programme was initiated by Ernst Mach in the late nineteenth century, and contributed to by such influential philosophers as Morris Schlick, Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, Carl Hempel, Herbert Feigl, Fredrick Ayer, Hans Reichenbach, Ernst Nagel and countless less famous others.1 Largely through Kuhn's efforts, philosophy of science took an historical turn in the 1970s - it was simply no longer acceptable for philosophers of science to discuss issues of methodology, explanation, values, theory structure and so on, without reference to how these matters are manifest in the history of science. Rudolf Carnap might have proudly said of himself that he was 'as an unhistorically minded a person as one could imagine' (Suppe 1977, p.310) but, after Kuhn's impact on the field, such confessions were a rarity. A marriage, if somewhat uneasy, was enacted between philosophy and history of science.2

Notes

References

Bachelard, G.: 1940/1968, The Philosophy of No, The Orion Press, New York.

Baltas, A., Gavroglu, K. & Kindi, V.: 1997, 'A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn: A Physicist who became a Historian for Philosophical Purposes', Neusis 6, 145-200.

Brante, T., Fuller, S. & Lynch, W. (eds): 1993, Controversial Science: From Content to Contention, State University of New York Press, Albany NY.

Carey, S.: 1992, `The Origin and Evolution of Everyday Concepts'. In R.N. Giere (ed.) Cognitive Models of Science, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MN, pp.89-128.

Conant, J. & Haugeland, J.: 2000, The Road Since Structure: Thomas S. Kuhn, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Connelly, F.M.: 1969, 'Philosophy of Science and the Science Curriculum', Journal of Research in Science Teaching 6, 108-113.

Lincoln, Y. & Guba, E.: 1985, Naturalistic Inquiry, Sage Publications, Newbury Park, CA.