ABSTRACT
This chapter is predicated on the belief that research and development efforts in science education over the last few decades have had disappointingly little influence on science teachers and science teaching. While the arguments I shall present below do not provide conclusive evidence for this belief, they do indicate some limitations of previous work. They also highlight a research perspective which I believe has the potential to redress this situation. The boundaries of argument are not limited to science education. While the teaching and learning of science do pose particular problems, these problems in other senses are subsumed within more general considerations concerning the nature and process of teaching and learning. Thus, I shall first allude to these more general considerations and then, in later sections, set them within the science context.
