For people to make sense of new information they have to relate it to their past experience and prior learning. Interpretive resources refers to those memories, images, meanings for terms, existing conceptions, etc., that the person has available to help make sense of new experience including what they hear and read.
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RSC
The Royal Society of Chemistry is a learned society and professional membership organisation for those working in the chemical sciences (including chemistry education). It has its primary presence in the UK and Eire (the islands of Britain and Ireland), but has an international membership. It is also a leading international academic publisher in chemistry and cognate subjects.
NASA
NASA is the United State's National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA was responsible for American space exporation missions like Mercury, Gemini, Apollo (which took people to visit the moon and collect scientific data and samples), the Space Shuttle, Skylab (an orbitiing space station – a precursor of the ISS [Inernational Space Station]) and Pioneer and Voyager probes which collected data form other planets. NASA is funded by the United States government.
umwelt
The world as experienced by a particular organism – its sensory world. (The term is taken from the work of Jakob von Uexküll .)
underdetermination
Scientific theories and laws are always undetermined by the available data: that is, there is never sufficient data to be absolutely saw that the scientific account always applies just as we think. New data can lead to changes in established scientific ideas (such as the now discredited idea that information only moves one way from D.N.A. to R.N.A. to protein).
bracketing
Bracketing is a technique or process derived from phenomenological approaches to research/analysis where one is required to suspect judgement about research foci – that is to put aside preconceptions, such as widely accepted common-sense notions about their nature.
target knowledge
An account set out as the desired level of learning in some specific curriculum. In school science, target knowledge will often be a considerably simplified account of some area of current scientific knowledge. These representations of science designed for learners at at some educational level can be considered as 'curricular models' of the science.
constant comparison
Constant comparison is an analytical technique used in qualitative data analysis, especially in research described as 'grounded theory' – it seeks to iteratively test increasingly refined hypotheses about patterns in the data (a process that has been labelled 'post-inductive resonance')
S.I.
The internationally agreed system of units (Système International d'Unités) used by scientists around the world to ensure clear communication of results.
British Science Association
The current name for the British Association for the Advancement of Science (founded 1831) which was a major organisation for the organisation and public dissemination of science in Britain. It's annual meetings (now festivals of science) attracted much media attention. The famous/infamous debate about Charles Darwin's work – often presented as a face-off between Darwin's ('bulldog') supporter Thomas Huxley and Bishop 'Soapy' Samuel Wilberforce – took pace at one such meeting (in 1860).
Renaissance
The Renaissance is a period in European history (15th-16th Centuries) which traditionally is considered to bridge between the medieval period ('middle ages), and the modern period (with the birth of modern science). Renaissance means 're-birth' and was thought to reflect the rediscover of earlier aesthetic and humanist values after the so-called 'dark ages' of the medieval period. This distinction is now considered over-simplistic.
vitalism
vitalism is the once-common belief that living things were different from inanimate objects as they had some innate life-force that was distinct form the forces studies in the physical sciences