In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Duke of Argyll, in his presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, stated that “what we want in the teaching of the young, is, not so much mere results, as the methods and above all, the history of science.” The Duke’s exhortation has been more ignored than followed, but there has been a minority tradition in the US, UK, and European science education that has attempted to bring history into science curricula and classrooms. This minority tradition has been energized over the past decade by widespread inclusion of “Nature of Science” goals into national and state curriculum documents and science education standards; the argument of many is that the nature of science cannot be understood apart from its history.
At different times and places, there have been appeals to the following seven reasons for including a historical component in science programs (Matthews 1994):
- 1.
History promotes the better...
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Matthews, M.R. (2013). History of Science in the Curriculum. In: Gunstone, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Science Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6165-0_162-1
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