Scientific, Didactical and Analogical Models in Science Teaching

This chapter presents theoretical ideas and practical proposals that can be inscribed in one of the lines of research and innovation of my group GEHyD at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (Argentina), the line dealing with the nature and function of what I call “school scientific models”. Some of the results I have obtained in this line were reported in presentations at various biennial editions of the REF (Reunión Nacional de Educación en Física: National Meeting on Physics Education, in Argentina) and in scientific publications in different formats (e.g., Galagovsky & Adúriz-Bravo, 2001; Adúriz-Bravo & Galagovsky, 2003; Adúriz-Bravo, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015b, 2017, 2022; Adúriz-Bravo et al., 2014; Ariza et al., 2016; Díaz-Guevara et al., 2019). In all these publications, I present -with a number of collaborators from Argentina, Spain and Colombia- theoretically-grounded reflections from didactics of science (i.e., science education understood as a scientific discipline) about the different roles played by representations, models, analogies, and metaphors in the construction and communication of school scientific knowledge in (formal) science teaching processes within compulsory education.