ABSTRACT
It is a truism to say that the central aim of science education is to help the learner acquire ‘an understanding of science’. This is widely taken to include at least three elements;
• an understanding of some parts of the corpus of accepted science knowledge (knowing some facts, laws, theories about the natural world);
• an understanding of the methods and procedures of enquiry used in science (knowing something about how the body of scientific knowledge has been established and how it is still being extended);
• some understanding of science as a social enterprise (the inter-relationships between science and the wider society; issues concerning the application of science; the internal social structures of science; issues and disputes within science and their resolution).
