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Limited awareness about nature and its species can have a negative influence on children’s relationship to nature. Plant species recognition and outdoor education are perhaps the easiest way to approach nature relationships and increase knowledge. Unfortunately, it has been shown that people do not recognize plant species very well. This phenomenon is called “plant blindness”. This study presents information about the phenomenon in Finland. The purpose of this research was to determine how well Finnish students from different age groups recognize plant species and which variables explain recognition of plant species in general education in Finland. The subjects were pupils from primary school to university teachers. A total of 754 people took part in the research. The results showed that Finnish pupils do not recognize plant species very well, with wide variations in responses between student levels. Species recognition skills improved from primary school to university teachers.

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The article discusses the development of an educational model intended to support teachers’ professional development in science education. In this research and development project, LumaLähetit, pre-service teachers, in-service teachers, and teacher educators formed teams to collaboratively plan teaching and produce material for inquiry-based and integrative science instruction in primary schools. The results are based on three design cycles of the model. Thus far, ten schools, 24 in-service teachers, 30 pre-service teachers, and 560 pupils have participated. The results, which are based on the qualitative content analysis of participants’ open answers to a questionnaire, indicate that the developed collaborative model for science education supported preservice teachers and in-service teachers’ professional development in many ways. Several processes mediating the embodiment of the designed model were identified, especially during the second or third design cycles. Participants reflected on theory and practice. They experienced increased knowledge about inquiry and integrative approaches, collaborated in teams to some extent, and found this to be supportive during the project. Also, pre-service teachers appreciated the opportunity to teach in the schools. In general, careful goal setting, collaboration between the participants, and guidance by teacher educators during the initiation of the project were found to be crucial to the further success of the project. The results highlight a need for further research in order to better meet to the challenges of team teaching, inquiry-based instruction, and integrative teaching. The designed model was developed between the cycles and must be further developed in the future, especially in terms of supporting collaboration and clarifying theoretical concepts during the project.

This study provides an overview of the didactic focus areas in educational research in biology, chemistry and physics, seeking to identify the focus areas that are investigated frequently and those that have been studied rarely or not at all. We applied the didactic focus-based categorization analysis method (DFCM), which is based on an extension of the didactic triangle. As the data set, we used 250 papers published in the Nordic Studies in Science Education (NorDiNa) between 2005 and 2013, and the European Science Education Research Association (ESERA) 2013 conference proceedings covering education at upper secondary and tertiary levels. The results show that the teacher's pedagogical actions and the student-content relationship were the most frequently studied aspects. On the other hand, teachers' reflections on the students' perceptions and attitudes about goals and content, and teachers' conceptions of the students' actions towards achieving the goals were studied least. Irrespective of the publication forum, the distributions of foci to different categories were quite similar. Our historical analysis completes the recent studies in the field as it is based on the theory driven categorization system instead of the data driven approaches used by the previous researchers. Moreover, our further observations on more recent publications suggest that no significant changes have taken place, and therefore wider discussion about the scope and the coverage of the research in science education is needed.