Research in Science Education最新文献

Chemical reasoning, and in particular structure–property reasoning, is an important goal of chemistry education. Johnstone’s triangle (1982, 1991) is often used to explicate this type of reasoning. This triangle describes the multilevel thought chemical reasoning requires and shows why students find chemistry so difficult. However, this model gives little guidance for teachers and students on how to teach and learn structure–property reasoning. In this theoretical article, we propose an alternative model for structure–property reasoning which has three advantages compared with previous models, namely, more coherence between chemical concepts and the skill of reasoning, more horizontal coherence (coherence between the concepts), and more vertical coherence (coherence throughout the school years). In four cases selected from the Dutch secondary school chemistry curriculum, the model was used to show how it can guide teachers and students in teaching and learning structure–property reasoning, and to demonstrate these above-named three advantages. The presented model has various educational applications as a scaffold for students’ reasoning, and as an instruction, design, and curriculum tool for teachers.

Background

Intrinsic motivation plays a unique mediating role in student academic performance. An inquiry-based learning (IBL) physics practical is studied in terms of effects on secondary school students’ intrinsic motivation towards performing science practicals.

Results

After performing IBL experiments on ionizing radiation, 38 secondary school physics students were interviewed and expressed their need for support in two main areas: the inquiry process and non-salient tasks, i.e., operating the equipment. The IBL experiments were revised accordingly, providing scaffolding through revised worksheets and videos on the use of the equipment. Subsequently, a quasi-experiment was carried out. One experimental group received both a revised worksheet and a video (N = 88), the other only received the worksheet (N = 67). Students performing the same practical on the basis of a step-by-step instruction sheet were used as a control group (N = 87). Five subscales of the intrinsic motivation inventory were used as a pre- and post-test for all three groups. Results show significant gains in the Interest/Enjoyment as well as Effort/Importance subscales favouring both IBL groups. With an instructional video, all five subscales show a significant increase as compared to the control group.

Conclusions

The results point to the advantages of using an IBL approach for practicals, provided appropriate scaffolding is used in terms of equipment operation and inquiry process.

The incorporation of socioscientific issues into science teaching to promote students’ scientific literacy may require that science teachers reconsider and transform their teaching practices. This study examines the knowledge and considerations involved when two teachers incorporated socioscientific issues into their teaching, with the aim of understanding conditions for developing teaching to promote functional scientific literacy. Data consisted of written records of teaching, field notes of classroom observations and transcripts of meetings between the teachers and a researcher, generated during a year-long professional development project. Data were analysed through the framework of didactics that understands teaching as framed by societal conditions, curricula, teaching traditions and teacher and student knowledge and intentions. The results show that the incorporation of socioscientific issues enabled student engagement with scientific content, the practice of evidence-based reasoning and the consideration of values and norms. The teachers strove to seize upon student questions in teaching, and the results show that this may require strategies to raise questions among students, as well as profound science content knowledge on the part of teachers. Moreover, the results indicate that tensions arose between students’ instrumental views of teaching and learning and the teachers’ promotion of an exploratory classroom culture. The teachers had to support student adaption to the new requirements, and in this process, mutual trust and clear expectations were considered important. Implications for teachers’ professional development in relation to the incorporation of socioscientific issues in science education are discussed.

Science education research has typically been aligned with a collection of familiar topics and ideas. However, the field, like many others, is becoming ever more varied as it responds to a range of remarkable social, cultural, and technological changes. In this paper, the Guest Editors of Research in Science Education’s Special Issue ‘Early Career Innovations in Science Education Research’ reflect on the future directions of research represented in both the Early Career Researcher submissions to the Special Issue and a brief survey administered to the journal’s Editorial Board members. We report on trends related to new, divergent, and creative innovations, situating these innovations in the context of the history of the field as represented by one of the world’s leading science education journals.

Understanding teachers’ experiences as they lived them and as they told them is important for conceptualizing a well-rounded view of the state of science education and the role teachers play in it. Journey mapping, a way of visualizing one’s processes and experiences as they progress towards a goal, is a tool with the potential to capture teachers’ lived experiences. The purpose of this study was to explore elementary teachers’ lived experiences as they work to provide science and engineering learning experiences for their students. This paper highlights the use of STEM journey mapping as a way of exploring teachers’ lived experiences in their day-to-day practice. This study features the STEM journey map and subsequent narrative of a fourth-grade teacher, Elliot. The data analysis supported the argument that journey mapping was a powerful tool for exploring teachers’ lived experiences.

While many university health science programs include physics courses to raise knowledge and understanding of physical science concepts, they are still far from addressing the needs of that science health profession. This study aimed to investigate the effect of an introductory physics course on first-year physiotherapy and rehabilitation (PR) students’ conceptual understanding of simple electric circuits. The study participants were students enrolled in the Physics II course. Eighty-two students registered for the course. Sixty students (73%) took the pretest, and 67 (81%) completed the posttest. 53 students (64%) took the pretest and posttest. This study adopts an exploratory research methodology that includes a one-group pretest-posttest design. The Simple Electric Circuits Diagnostic Test (SECDT) was used to assess students’ conceptual understanding. The prevalence of misconceptions was relatively low (before and after instruction), and very few students developed sound conceptual understanding after instruction. The local reasoning model was the most frequent misconception PR students held. After instruction, students’ overall confidence in their SECDT responses increased significantly. Interestingly, when the students were grouped into three achievement groups, the medium-achievement group fell into more misconceptions as their achievement increased compared to low- and high-achievement groups. These findings suggested that students’ low SECDT scores were due to a lack of knowledge rather than misconceptions.

The advancement of technology has led to a growing interest in assessing scientific inquiry within digital platforms. This shift towards dynamic and interactive inquiry assessments enables researchers to investigate not only the accuracy of student responses (product data) but also their steps and actions leading to those responses (process data). This is done by analyzing computer-generated log files that capture student activity during the assessment. The present study leverages this opportunity by drawing insights from student log files of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). It demonstrates the potential of process data in uncovering typically unobserved students’ problem-solving processes by focusing on two critical scientific inquiry skills: coordinating the effects of multiple variables and coordinating a theory with evidence. This study presents two examples for analyzing process data. The first example examined data from the PISA field trial study and showcased the advantage of using a process mining approach to visualize the sequence of students’ steps and actions in conducting investigations. The second example linked student log files and questionnaire data from the PISA 2015. It applied latent profile analysis to identify unique patterns of students’ inquiry performance and examined their relationships to their school-based inquiry experiences. Findings from both examples indicate that students often encounter considerable challenges in solving complex inquiry tasks, especially in applying multivariable reasoning and constructing scientific explanations. This study highlights the profound potential of process data in facilitating a deeper understanding of how students interact with scientific inquiry tasks in a digital-based environment.

Swedish preschool science practice is confined to a unique educational setting where upbringing, care, and education are intertwined. This allows teachers to develop innovative cross-curricular and multidimensional science teaching. At the same time, society demands the digitalization of preschool practice, which has caused concern not only about negative effects on children’s well-being but also the risk of foregrounding digital over analog tools in multidimensional and child-centered preschool practice. The aim of this study is to analyze how preschool teachers at the forefront of digitalization integrate digital and analog tools when teaching science and how this integration affects their practice. The data comprises documentation of digitalized science activities provided by ten preschool teachers and transcribed recall interviews with four of the teachers. Thematic content analysis and a framework for analyzing seven teaching dimensions of preschool science revealed the use of digital and analog tools as drivers for multidimensional science education. The findings show that the teachers primarily use digital tools to reinforce social learning, inclusion, and agency during science activities. Digital and analog tools were used to complement one another in pursuing the boundaries of multidimensional science. However, the content of this innovative and digitalized science teaching remained primarily within biology, the traditional scholarly discipline in preschool science. We conclude that the digitalization of preschool science seems to be used to strengthen and diversify teaching within the boundaries of overarching traditional preschool practice where nature encounters and children’s interests and well-being are at the forefront.

States and school districts in the USA have begun to create and implement curriculum to promote elementary students’ nascent STEM-related interests and to generate their initial knowledge of careers in those fields. Evaluating the efficacy of such interventions warrants valid and reliable tools, which are not presently available for middle childhood (ages 6–11) aged students in lower elementary school (approximately grades 2 to 4). This research study describes the creation and validation of the STEM Future-Career Interest Survey (STEM Future-CIS), a survey informed by extant inventories (i.e., Student Attitudes toward Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Survey and STEM Career Interest Survey) and grounded in the constructs of interest, self-efficacy beliefs, outcome expectations, and personal goals (i.e., social cognitive career theory or SCCT) to better understand the knowledge and interest in S-T-E-M fields for grades 2–4. From two rounds of student and teacher interviews and pilots punctuated by periods of expert review, 804 students (grades 2–4 in the southeastern U.S.) participated in the STEM Future-CIS. By employing exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses among four models, results affirmed SCCT constructs as a model for how middle childhood aged students conceive their interest to engage in future career considerations in 25 items and four validated factors of math/science interest, engineering interest, technology interest, and future self. Sampled students were able to report technology and engineering interests; however, they experienced difficulty in differentiating math and science subject areas and the related future career opportunities in engineering and technology.

There has been a strong narrative in Australia of falling attainment in high school science, with much of the campaign informed by results from international standardised tests such as Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which shows a year-on-year decline in scientific literacy of Australian 15-year-old students. These results have been used to justify significant policy and curriculum reform, despite the known limitations of PISA and a lack of additional evidence to support this decline in other tests. In this paper, results from standardised tests administered in Australia will be compared to create a fulsome picture of attainment for high school science students. Reports include both the compilation of data from existing reports and new analyses. With the latest (2018/9) reports from PISA, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and National Assessment Program for Scientific Literacy (NAP-SL) (an Australian test of Science Literacy) and data shared by the NSW Department of Education on ‘The Validation of Assessment for Learning and Individual Development’ (VALID) test for the years 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018, this offers the most complete picture of student attainment in science to date. Results show that there are disagreements between tests on cohort achievement over time and distribution of attainment at different ‘proficiency levels’. These results suggest caution when using these key results from these tests to inform policy and pedagogy.