Journal of Research in Science Teaching最新文献

Much research investigates why women do not participate in physics, or why female attrition in physics is high; this study focuses on elite female academic physicists and how they have persisted and succeeded in their fields. As opposed to researching reasons for attrition or not participating, this study focuses on six elite female academic physicists' strategies for flourishing in a male-dominated field. Through semi-structured life-history interviews, the participants' narratives revealed their gendered identities to be hybrid: they all identified as female, but performed a particular kind of masculinity by actively embodying four of the same characteristics that normally deter females from participating in physics. This perspective is used to discover how these women, pioneers in their subfields, actively negotiated hostile environments and became successful. These findings give insight into the identities female physicists construct so that they can follow their passion; understanding why they made these choices provides an opportunity to make change in physics departments as well as the messages the science education community sends to young physicists.

Elementary engineering, as an emergent or “contentious” practice, is fertile ground for cultural analysis. Contentious practice (Holland, D., & Lave, J. (2001). History in person: Enduring struggles, contentious practice, intimate identities. School of American Research Press) highlights how historically enduring narratives of science, engineering, schooling, and minoritized youth get taken up, figured, and refigured in local practice. The study's research questions were: What classroom cultural narratives of “good engineers” were important for fifth-grade, minoritized children's engineering design work? How did local and macro-level cultural narratives about science and engineering, elementary schooling, and minoritized students intersect? How were multi-leveled cultural narratives consequential for children's engineering work? Using ethnographic methods, researchers analyzed videos, field notes, and interviews with 20 students and their teacher, focusing on engineering design discussion and activities. The authors identified two key narratives: good engineers (1) get along well with others and (2) use evidence to make design decisions. The banality of these narratives makes them ripe for deconstruction. By beginning with children's meanings of engineering competence and framing engineering as contentious practice, the authors: (1) identify the tensions in these seemingly innocuous narratives and practices; (2) illustrate children's creativity and labor in navigating tensions; (3) demonstrate the workings of macro-level racialized, technocratic, and Western scientistic narratives and their reconfigurations in local practice; and (4) reject deficit-based perspectives that would frame classroom struggles by assigning blame to the teacher or students. Recommendations for practice include normalizing disagreement, providing tools for joint decision-making, broadening meanings of evidence, and co-constructing meanings of kindness. A contentious practice lens highlights the ever-presence of historicized narratives in local productions of practice and renders elementary engineering as an ongoing accomplishment, opening spaces of possibility less readily available to established practices of elementary schooling. However, without explicit attention to countering racialized narratives applied to minoritized youth in such settings, these spaces tighten up, limiting the potential for social change.

Access to computer science education (CSEd) has greatly expanded in recent years. Starting with the Computer Science for All Initiative, launched in 2016 under President Obama, CSEd has expanded across the U.S. with over half of high schools offering at least one computer science course. Although there has been growth in computer science course offerings, disparities exist when it comes to ‘who’ enrolls in CSEd courses, and ‘where’ those courses are being offered. These disparities highlight that while funding and support for CSEd has increased, little is known about the capacity of states to operationalize (and implement) policies to achieve equitable CSEd. Furthermore, how recent changes at the federal and state level(s) are directly impacting minoritized populations' access, participation, and engagement in CSEd. This commentary focuses on the state-level capacity to implement equity-focused CSEd policies that can lead to improvements in student opportunities and outcomes. We argue that state CSEd leaders engage at the intersection of four areas: (1) growing state investment in CSEd, (2) increasingly polarizing political environments, (3) securing human and fiscal resources to implement CSEd policy with fidelity, and (4) supporting Culturally Responsive Computing that sustains equitable teaching and learning practices in schools and classrooms. This commentary also serves as a Call to Action for STEM education researchers to listen closely and carefully to the communities served by CSEd research, including students, families, and educators.

Persistence across undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs is exceptionally low. Recent studies have shown that social support and sense of belonging are particularly important for students who are historically underrepresented in STEM, yet few interventions have directly targeted or investigated these factors. This qualitative study investigates low-income, high-achieving undergraduate STEM students' perceptions of their belonging in the context of a 2-year peer social support group intervention. Interview analysis of 11 participants demonstrates that these STEM students attribute their sense of belonging to feelings or displays of comfort, commonality, community, and concerted effort. The peer group facilitated increases in participants' social support and sense of belonging by allowing participants to build friendships, recognize shared experiences, connect to their campus, build confidence with peers, and feel supported in their non-academic and academic struggles. Although the program's main objective was to build participants' sense of belonging, the social support provided through the peer group also acted as a mechanism for increasing information-related social capital. We recommend the implementation of similar non-academic, supportive social spaces to increase the sense of belonging and overall persistence of low-income STEM students.

The rise of social media platforms and subsequent lack of traditional gatekeeping mechanisms have enabled the proliferation of scientific disinformation. Users attempting to properly evaluate scientific information and disinformation are immensely obstructed by media communication mechanisms such as filter bubbles and echo chambers. Given the recent approaches to reconceptualizing the nature of science represented by facets of media communication mechanisms, we report results from seven focus groups of 26 tenth-grade students (M = 15 years; 58% female, 38% male, 4% nonbinary) investigating such mechanisms as applied to climate change content on social media. Using qualitative content analysis, we identified the students' awareness and conceptions of mechanisms such as filter bubbles and echo chambers on a continuum between rather simple and elaborate. The findings suggest that the students have a general awareness of most mechanisms based on their own experiences and describe additional media communication mechanisms, such as bots, microtargeting, and, particularly, algorithms, which appear specifically relevant in dealing with scientific disinformation on social media. Based on the results, we derive a set of needs for science educational learning materials and science media literacy to prepare students to tackle scientific disinformation on social media.

Students frequently turn to the internet for information about a range of scientific issues. However, they can find it challenging to evaluate the credibility of the information they find, which may increase their susceptibility to mis- and disinformation. This exploratory study reports findings from an instructional intervention designed to teach high school students to engage in scientific online reasoning (SOR), a set of competencies for evaluating sources of scientific information on the internet. Forty-three ninth grade students participated in eleven instructional activities. They completed pre and post constructed response tasks designed to assess three constructs: evaluating conflicts of interest, relevant scientific expertise, and alignment with scientific consensus. A subset of students (n = 6) also completed pre and post think-aloud tasks where they evaluated websites of varying credibility. Students' written responses and screen-capture recordings were scored, coded, and analyzed using a mixed-methods approach. Findings from the study demonstrate that after the intervention: (1) students' assessment scores improved significantly on all three tasks, (2) students improved in their ability to distinguish between sources of online scientific information of varying credibility, and (3) more students used online reasoning strategies and outside sources of information. Areas for student growth are also identified, such as improving coordinated use of credibility criteria with online reasoning strategies. These results suggest that teaching criteria for the credibility of scientific information, along with online reasoning strategies, has the potential to help students evaluate scientific information encountered on the internet.

The goals of science education must be sufficiently broad to support learners navigating changing scientific, social, and media landscapes. This position paper builds upon existing scholarship to articulate a set of constructs useful for navigating the modern information landscape including constructs with a long history in science education (e.g., science content knowledge, science practices, nature of science) as well as those still relatively uncommon in science education (e.g., domain-general epistemological beliefs, science disciplinary literacy, socioscientific reasoning, science media literacy, nature of technology, and critical consciousness). The paper first defines each construct, discusses how each construct supports navigating the modern information landscape, and explores research concerning the teaching and learning of each construct. Then, in the section “Application of Constructs to the Modern Information Landscape”, the paper succinctly explains how the constructs collectively combat particular struggles people may encounter. In addition to defining and articulating the constructs' utility, we explore strategies educators can use to integrate these constructs into their science teaching. Finally, we discuss implications for teaching, teacher education, and future research.

Teaching science in an age of disinformation and misinformation requires empowering students to address inaccurate information in evidence-based ways. Science communication scholarship highlights the growing importance of inclusive and relational approaches for addressing misinformation. Thus, we developed, implemented, and evaluated an interdisciplinary, graduate-level course for students in STEM, journalism/communication, and public health to learn to address misinformation using community-engaged, evidence-based approaches. We used the Theory of Planned Behavior as a theoretical framework for our mixed-methods analysis of the efficacy of this course, assessing both the behaviors that students planned to utilize in community-engaged science communication to address misinformation, as well as the attitudes, norms, and perceived behavioral control that influenced these planned behaviors. Quantitative self-report metrics indicated that this curriculum increased students' subjective norms for misinformation correction as well as perceived behavioral control of science communication and science civic engagement. Thematic analysis of qualitative student interview data showed that the course helped students increase their plans for inclusive approaches to addressing misinformation. This study indicates the importance of community-engaged curriculum to develop the mindset and self-efficacy necessary for scientists-in-training to address misinformation in their communities.

This study explored a middle school science teacher's curricular sensemaking in interaction with their use of an educative storyline curriculum, aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards, that was intentionally designed for more opportunities for students' scientific sensemaking. Using a phenomenological case study methodology, we examined how the focal teacher perceived and resolved (un)certainties in their understanding that emerged in their interaction with the curriculum (i.e., their curricular sensemaking), and how the teachers' curricular sensemaking impacted opportunities for students' scientific sensemaking. Findings served to expand our notions of how teachers engage in curricular sensemaking, when this sensemaking occurs, and what teachers make sense of as they experience a new, reform-oriented curriculum for the first time. In particular, the focal teacher found two types of (un)certainty to be salient at various time points during his curriculum use: (un)certainty around students' scientific sensemaking through particular science practices and (un)certainty about how to navigate the storyline curriculum using students' ideas to drive learning forward. Cutting across these types of (un)certainty, our findings suggest the need to (1) support teachers in problematizing their own understandings about particular science practices and the extent to which their previous instruction aligns with reform-oriented conceptualizations of those practices, (2) build teachers' capacity to differentiate between various causes of student discomfort and uncertainty so that students' needs and scientific sensemaking goals can be attended to simultaneously, and (3) provide teachers with opportunities to consider how they might use a variety of participation structures to move learning forward while preserving students' rights and responsibilities for the scientific sensemaking.