Bringing together authors from Europe, the USA and Canada, this collection explores the development of science teaching since the eighteenth century. Its main agendas arise from two areas that its editors perceive as largely overlooked: the potential use of experiments in contemporary teaching and the study of education within the history of science. As they note, such ambitious aims cannot be fully met in a single volume, but it is a promising start.

The rich material available to historians is evident in the range of media discussed in the volume: instruments, apparatus and experiments; texts; the lesson and demonstration; teaching laboratories; teaching aids and models; museums and gardens; and specimens, living and dead. With an introduction and fourteen chapters, moreover, there are many approaches to consider, some of which take the volume beyond the notional confines of its subtitle.

Naturally, instruments and experiments are strong presences. Peter Heering's exemplary chapter sets the scene by considering the transformation of instruments from research tools into teaching aids, suggesting four potential processes: simplification, downscaling, stabilization and iconization. His chapter is complemented by Paolo Brenni's survey of physics-teaching instruments between about 1800 and 1930, which also touches on the relationship between the hardwares of research and of teaching. A number of other chapters concentrate on the development of collections of instruments for teaching, including Lissa Roberts on two large collections for the instruction of Dutch orphans, Mar Cuenca-Lorente and Josep Simon on the growth of physics and chemistry collections in nineteenth-century Spanish secondary education, and Michelle Hoffmann on concerted attempts to introduce practical teaching methods in Ontario in the 1880s.

Other material aids are considered as well. Willem Hackmann looks at the history of the magic-lantern slide, which became a specialized teaching aid in the nineteenth century, and which he sees as the ‘precursor of PowerPoint presentations’ (p. 113). Dawn Sanders, by contrast, looks at the death and life of the plant specimen in the early twentieth century to uncover the troubled history of botany teaching, in which even the educational possibilities of studying nature became a contested subject.

The other side of the story is experimentation. Richard Kremer offers an analysis of textbooks (because little else survives by way of evidence, he notes) to investigate the introduction of student laboratory exercises in American physics teaching in the 1880s. Roland Wittje looks to the development of lecture demonstrations in early twentieth-century Germany through the groundbreaking work of Robert Pohl, for whom the act of performance was central.

Other authors focus on texts. Peter Langman analyses experimental-philosophy works of the eighteenth century, notably The Newtonian System of Philosophy by ‘Tom Telescope’ and Francesco Algarotti's Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy Explain'd for the Use of the Ladies, which described the experience of witnessing. He argues that these portrayals of instruments and their use were for audiences who would not normally have seen them and so were creations rather than re-creations. Pere Grapí challenges the view that textbooks presented only stable and agreed theories by looking at nineteenth-century French examples and their role in chemical controversy, in this case over Berthollet's chemical affinities. Constantine Skordoulis, Gianna Katsiampoura and Efthymios Nicolaidis consider the ways in which textbooks – as translations, adaptations and finally original works – became embroiled in moves towards Greek liberation as part of a story of initial reception from the European ‘centre’ and then a move away from it.

While most chapters concentrate on selected evidence, Steven Turner's on the use of inclined-plane apparatus between 1880 and 1920 exemplifies the combined consideration of the full range of sources. In tracing the transformation of students from observers to experimenters, he draws on textbooks, laboratory manuals, student notebooks, teaching instruments and instrument catalogues to challenge previous narratives of a revolutionary period in scientific pedgagogy. It is an excellent methodological example.

Rounding off the volume is a chapter added since the 2009 symposium, an afterword in which Hayo Siemsen reflects on the role of instruments in teaching science today. Siemsen is keen to distinguish the way students see instruments from the way scientists do. ‘Instruments’, he writes, ‘convey no other scientific meaning than in the way they are used’ (p. 355) and should intuitively connect with students' everyday lives. His argument therefore challenges the idea of simply using laboratory-designed instruments based on those used in research. He is also keen to distinguish the demonstration of phenomena from performing experiments, activities that require quite different apparatus. Based on approaches currently being applied successfully in Finland, his contribution is an interesting counterpoint to what has gone before.

With such a range of authors and topics, there is much to be drawn from this group of essays, which opens up fertile ground for future work. This is one of the editors' aims, so they have certainly laid a solid foundation. They are also honest about some of the deficiencies, notably the volume's partial and episodic nature. Given the many links to be made between the chapters, however, I did feel that an index would have been a useful addition. I would also add that some of the chapters are predominantly descriptive and could go further in providing some analysis and thoughts about the bigger picture, but again this is something that can follow. I do not hesitate, however, to recommend this as a thought-provoking contribution to an important aspect of the history of science and as a potent demonstration of the range of sources historians could be exploiting.