This article discusses the meaning of a sociocultural perspective on science education: viewing science, science education, and research on science education as human social activities conducted within institutional and cultural frameworks. Sociocultural theory proposes that cooperative human activity is only possible because we all grow up and live within larger-scale social organizations or institutions (e.g., family, school, church, work) and perhaps also city and nation/state institutions, as well as the potentially globe-spanning modes of social media interactions. Similarly, it means seeing the scientific study of the world as itself inseparable from the social organization of scientists' activities. As a research perspective, this view seeks to elucidate the problems that arise from our limited view of the larger system we inhabit, and to identify just how our actions also function on many larger scales. Sociocultural perspectives include the social-interactional, the organizational, the sociological; the social-developmental, the biographical, the historical, the linguistic, and the cultural domains.