Journal of Research in Science Teaching最新文献

Families play a pivotal role in fostering children's science literacy, interests, and identities through everyday interactions and informal learning contexts, with parents as main facilitators. An essential, yet often underexplored, aspect of this process is the role of emotions in shaping science learning experiences. Emotions serve as powerful mediators of engagement, influencing key learning outcomes such as interest, motivation, achievement, and persistence. Despite the recognized importance of family engagement in science learning and the emotional dimensions associated with it, there is a significant gap in research specifically examining how families engage with science at home and the role emotions play in these settings. In this case study, we employed a mixed methods approach consisting of electro-dermal activity (physiological) and recorded observations (behavioral) to identify the emotional expressions of a mother as she engaged in five science activities with her children (ages 13, 11, 7, and 4) at home. All five activities were analyzed utilizing the following procedures: 1. Peak analysis, 2. Structural breaks, and 3. Microanalysis. We complemented our interpretation of the data with reflective notes and a reflective interview (self-reports) with the participant. The study reveals that mediated activities elicit more positive emotional expressions; the interrelationship between emotions and cognitive, social, and cultural domains needs to be accounted for while analyzing emotions, and highlights the methodological challenges of measuring emotions. By focusing on how a parent guides home science activities, it fills critical gaps in understanding family-based science engagement and sheds light on the affective dimensions of informal science learning. Employing a mixed methods approach provides a comprehensive understanding of emotional expressions during home science activities, which enhances the validity of the findings and captures the dynamic nature of emotions, offering a robust approach for analyzing the interplay between physiological, behavioral, and interpretive emotional expressions in real-world contexts.

This study explored how minoritized youth-guided experiences as facilitators of science outreach activities in their community can become a powerful pathway to developing their science capital. The educational setting was the Gap-Year Program run by Alrowad for Science and Technology. Alrowad is a grassroots non-profit organization founded by Arab academics in Israel. This organization aims to empower Arab students and enhance their participation in STEM learning and practice in schools, universities, and the workplace. Alrowad recruits about 10-15 outstanding Arab high school STEM graduates yearly for its Gap-Year Program before they start their undergraduate education. These individuals work as Young Arab Instructors (YAIs) who facilitate the organization's STEM outreach activities in Arab schools all over Israel while attending a year-long extensive professional development course. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with the alumni of the 2015 cohort (N = 9). The analysis employed a constructivist approach to Grounded Theory. The findings illustrate how epistemic agency, relational agency, and critical agency were developed through the participants' guided engagement in facilitating science outreach in their community. They show how this multifaceted agency became a valuable resource of science capital for the participants that had long-term effects on their learning, work, and practice in undergraduate and graduate school and the workplace, by providing the means to actively carve out their place in STEM, shape it, and make it their own.

Promoting argumentation based on evidence allows students to give meaning to the phenomena observed, enabling the construction of knowledge. Children's argumentative discourse can be activated by appropriate instruction, but there is little information on argumentation at early ages and there is a need for the teacher to understand how to foster and guide the articulation of ideas at this stage. In this study we aim to assess how teachers' dialogical practices stimulate young children to engage in argumentation and knowledge construction through simultaneously analyzing the teacher's questions and children's answers, from the double scope of the epistemic and argumentative operations. We analyzed elementary classroom discussions of students involved in inquiry activities on plant growth led by two different trainee teachers. Our results show that 6–7-year-olds were able to not only use experimental data and prior knowledge as evidence to generate explanations and draw conclusions but also evaluate and question the ideas of others. This gave rise to small argumentative nodes in which a process of co-construction of knowledge on plant growth and core concepts of the living being took place. We have identified three fundamental characteristics of the dialogical strategies that can condition the quality of the students' practice: the type of teacher's questions, the order or questioning sequence, and certain talk moves to manage correct or incorrect responses and to stimulate peer collaboration. Our results indicate that teachers could involve students in high-level epistemic operations but also implement appropriate dialogic techniques to raise the level of argumentation and scientific reasoning from an early age.

The rapid evolution of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is transforming science education by facilitating innovative pedagogical paradigms while raising substantial concerns about scholarly integrity. One particularly pressing issue is the growing risk of student use of GenAI tools to outsource assessment tasks, potentially compromising authentic learning and evaluations. Addressing these challenges requires reflection on existing assessment practices and features. This position paper advances a conceptual framework for science assessment through the lens of multimodality and interactivity. Multimodality emphasizes the use of diverse, organized semiotic resources for meaning making, while interactivity characterizes assessment environments where outcomes are shaped by students' actions. With the two dimensions, our multimodal interactive framework classifies assessments into four categories, with varying degrees of modality and interactivity. We argue that tasks with higher modality and interactivity can potentially overcome the concerns of GenAI on academic integrity. To further articulate this point, we provide concrete assessment examples for each category and explain how the prompt and response affordances in each assessment category help gauge students' understandings of key science constructs and identify tasks that are resistant or susceptible to AI-based outsourcing. We conclude by discussing how the framework serves as a meaningful analytical tool for educational researchers and practitioners.

The influence of emotions on teaching –learning processes is a topic of increasing interest in science education research. This study explores the emotions experienced by 121 preservice early childhood teachers during a training program in inquiry-based science education. Using a checklist of nine emotions (both positive and negative), participants indicated the emotions they experienced at three stages of the instruction: at the outset, after experiencing an inquiry cycle as science learners, and after designing an inquiry cycle as teacher trainees. Only five of the emotions (interest, concentration, confidence, enjoyment, and insecurity) were reported at all three stages, and closer analysis showed that their prevalence varied depending on the phase of the inquiry cycle and the role that students were in (i.e., science learners or teacher trainees). In both roles, insecurity was generally associated with the initial phases of inquiry (problem formulation, designing experiments, and choosing variables); enjoyment was more prevalent during the phases of realization of the experience in the science learner role and of data analysis in the teacher trainee role; and confidence was particularly associated with the drawing conclusions phase in both roles. These results suggest that in order to understand preservice early childhood teachers' emotions in relation to inquiry-based science education, it is necessary to consider the different phases of inquiry, each of which may generate a different emotional response. When instructing preservice teachers in the use of inquiry tasks, their emotions are also likely to vary depending on whether they are engaging with the approach as science learners or teacher trainees.

Energy is one important concept in physics, but science education research has repeatedly shown that students struggle to develop a full understanding of energy. Especially challenging for students is the notion of potential energy. Overwhelmed by the sheer number of potential energy forms, students struggle to make connections between them. Students often struggle to develop a conceptual understanding of potential energy, resulting in difficulties in learning about energy in general and their continued learning about energy. To address this issue, scholars have proposed incorporating fields into energy instruction. Through fields, the various forms of potential energy can be connected and synthesized into two simple underlying principles: (1) fields mediate interaction-at-a-distance and (2) the energy is stored in a field with the amount of energy depending on the configuration of the objects. Recent studies suggest that incorporating fields in middle school energy instruction is feasible and effective; however, little is known about whether and how middle school students connect energy and fields ideas to benefit their learning. In response to this research gap, we developed a unit on energy with fields and a comparable unit without fields and compared students' learning on energy in these two units. In a mixed-methods approach, we examined students' learning on energy during an introductory and a continued learning unit on energy with N = 67 students from grade 7. Our findings suggest that students who learned about energy with fields outperformed students who learned about energy without fields. Furthermore, fields-based energy instruction seemed to support students in developing better-connected knowledge networks that reflect deeper conceptual understanding of energy. Our findings suggest that incorporating fields into energy instruction could help students to better understand energy and to better continue learning about energy.

Research reports that interesting but irrelevant information, seductive details, in teaching material can impede learning. In science education, the inclusion of historical narratives in lessons to promote interest has been recommended but may hinder learning. This study examines the impact of seductive details on UK high school students' knowledge retention from video explanations. The research adopted a mixed methods approach. In the first study, an online survey (N = 101) randomized participants to watch video explanations of two physics topics (dark matter and tracers), with seductive details or without, and compared pre-, post-, and delayed knowledge test scores. Six participants were interviewed. In the second study, nine participants took part in a think-aloud protocol while watching videos to examine perceptions of the videos. In the first study, the seductive details in one topic (dark matter) harmed learning (p > 0.01, η² = 0.114), but not in the second (tracer, p = 0.166). Data from the think-aloud task indicate an explanation for the mixed effect. Seductive details may both impede learning but also promote attention to core content, chunk material, and provide structure into which new content can be anchored when prior knowledge is low. Seductive details should be used with caution. They have the potential to impede learning, but, in some contexts, their negative impact on learning may be limited. Their effects depend on the context. The inclusion of seductive details in video explanations should not be ruled out, and we present guidance for reducing the impediment that interesting but inessential details can cause.

This paper investigates how the coherent integration of three different tools for reflection during a science methods course can contribute to student teachers' planning and enactment of science teaching, that is, their development of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). The Refined Consensus Model (RCM) is used as a theoretical lens for conceptualizing links between teaching practice and the development of PCK. The results show how the student teachers' initial PCK (pPCK_input) was manifested into ePCK during planning and teaching, and further, through reflection, developed into a new and “richer” PCK (pPCK_output). The three tools encouraged collaborative discussion and reflection about teaching certain big ideas linked to a topic. The case presented in this paper proved to be a coherent way to encourage student teachers to collaborate, reflect, and discuss ideas about their teaching practice and their professional development.