Physical sciences and the school curriculum

The difficulties encountered by pupils and students when learning physics can often be explained by the differences that exist between their spontaneous ideas about the real world and how the scientist models this reality. How can children and adolescents be helped to better understand scientific ideas that could be of use to them? What is the role in learning and in teaching of: peer group interaction, different forms of representation (pictorial analogies, schemes, graphs), intelligent tutoring systems; etc? In this special edition there are a number of pieces of recent research of interest both to the researcher and to educator concerned with the development of knowledge and the teaching of the experimental sciences.