Science & Education最新文献

This study explored over 200 journals and a content-focussed research repository to investigate the occurrence of research on the Big Questions in the field of astronomy education research (AER), focussing on Cosmology and Religion. Using both qualitative and quantitative techniques, 151 articles were selected and analysed. Our results reveal that AER in the context of cosmology has increased vastly over the past few decades. Despite this, there is still a lack of research exploring the various constructs especially focussing on teacher education, curriculum, misconceptions, and the common ground between cosmology and religion. Our textual analysis of the articles revealed 16 themes, which could be encompassed into two overarching themes of “Science” and the “Universe”. We used a 13-criteria scoring rubric to analyse the constructs found in the articles. Using our scoring rubric, the top four criteria were Cosmology “Big Questions” (~ 29%), Cosmology Content (~ 22%), the Cosmology Science-Religion Debate (~ 19%), and Cosmology Attitudes (~ 18%). These results hint at a fertile landscape for research into Cosmology Education, and the Cosmology-Religion interface given the ground-breaking advances in modern Cosmology.

While dissent is recognized as a necessary component of scientific knowledge production, in school settings, it is a double-edged sword that can disrupt and undermine social cohesion just as it can promote thinking and creativity. This pilot study explores patterns of dissent in a science education context. It uses a mixed-methods approach to analyze the discourse of five post-secondary student groups at a US university engaged in a collaborative, problem-based science activity. The authors track the ways in which dissent contributed to the development of group ideas, as well as the roles played by individuals. In particular, this study shows that a single student appeared to account for a disproportionate amount of each group’s dissenting statements. The authors contend that dissent, while potentially detrimental to group cohesion, is vital for a group’s intellectual advancement, and they investigate in detail how the manifestations of dissent are related to the idea progression of the different groups. Finally, implications for science pedagogy and student group work are discussed.

In this study, we report the results of the content analysis of preservice middle school science teachers’ own written science storybooks and middle school female students’ reflections of five of the books. The participants of this study were 50 preservice middle school science teachers taking a history and nature of science course and 13 sixth-grade female students in a school in Turkey. We report representations of nature of science (NOS) aspects included in the preservice teachers’ own written storybooks. Observation and inference was the most commonly included aspect among the NOS aspects, followed by the tentative NOS. We used a qualitative analysis of transcribed classroom discussions around five storybooks used by five preservice teachers in their field experiences. We found that the teachers facilitated explicit reflections about NOS aspects and science content covered in the books. Our findings build on research showing that appropriately designed children’s science books can be used as classroom tools for supporting NOS instruction. We found that writing their storybooks and refining their NOS ideas through discussions provides a powerful tool for developing preservice teachers’ knowledge about NOS. Preservice teachers facilitated discussions promoting explicit student reflections about NOS aspects and science content using these books.

Current visions of science education advocate that students should engage with science in the classroom in ways that mirror the work of scientists in order to develop science proficiency. For this goal, teachers are tasked with the complex responsibility of supporting students in understanding not only the conceptual knowledge of science, but also its disciplinary practices, norms, and epistemologies. In order for teachers to teach in such ways, they must be afforded opportunities to develop and reflect on their own disciplinary understandings about science. Research Experiences for Teachers’ (RETs) programs, in which teachers engage in research with scientists, may be fertile contexts for the development of teachers’ robust understandings about science. As such, the purpose of this naturalistic single-case study is to explore the ways in which one elementary teacher (Ava) describes shifts in her disciplinary understandings about science after participating in a 6-week summer Research Experience for Teachers’ program. Through examination of interviews and observations, this study takes a critical event narrative analysis approach to unpack the ways in which Ava interprets certain disciplinary understandings about science in light of events during her research experience that to her had lasting and important impact on her understandings of science. We conclude by discussing the implications of this work for research and professional development design.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we are fighting not only the novel coronavirus, but also the “infodemic” induced by the pandemic. Therefore, it is urgent to explore approaches for enhancing individual immunity against science-related misinformation. We conducted a cross-sectional study to examine the relationship between public engagement with science (PES) and scientific information literacy (SIL) during the COVID-19 pandemic from college students (N = 8075) in China. The results showed that there was a significant difference between attitudes toward and activities of PES. More importantly, both PES activities and PES attitudes were found positively associated with SIL, especially the PES attitudes. The empirical study is significant in demonstrating the predictive effect of PES on individual ability to recognize science-related misinformation, which is crucial for mitigating harm from the “infodemic.” Our study indicated that other than a science communication model in order to restore public trust in science, PES is promising to be incorporated into informal science education to facilitate individual SIL.

The paper reports qualitative findings from a study about how science teachers enacted discursive purposes and talk moves to support the students’ experiments. Science teachers may have difficulties assisting students in designing and conducting valid and reliable experiments as the core epistemic practice of science teaching and learning. It is also known that teachers’ talk moves surround all teaching activities. It is therefore contributory to explore the teachers’ verbal scaffolds in aiding the students’ experiments. Nineteen middle school science teachers were the participants. This study was conducted as a naturalistic inquiry where the teachers’ in-class science inquiry implementations were systematically explored and analysed without any external intervention. Episode-based classroom discourse analyses and the systematic observations of the video records were conducted to classify the teachers’ discursive purposes and talk moves. The teachers tried to help the students compose better research questions by prompting them to operate multivariable reasoning. The teachers encouraged the students to replicate their experiments in different contexts with other persons or materials. The students were also assisted in coping with the presumable confounding variables to elucidate some unexpected experimental results. The teachers helped the students to gather reliable data. The students were also supported for generating richer discourse by making their research variables original within an acceptable time interval. Two discursive purposes, encouraging students to compose better research questions and use the given time effectively, were prominent among the observed eight purposes. For actualising these discursive purposes, the teachers enacted 26 types of talk moves with different frequencies. Recommendations were offered primarily in the sense of teacher noticing.

The paper reports about a study that examines changes in teachers’ incorporation of epistemic practices in their design of engineering lessons and compares them to their views about the nature of engineering knowledge across 100 hours of professional development. Nineteen K-8 teachers in the USA, who were new to teaching engineering as part of a shift in science learning standards, participated. We focused on four areas of engineering practice and epistemology, namely the orientation of engineering toward solutions, the role of context in defining engineering design specifications, the role and nature of data and evidence, and the interdisciplinary nature of science and engineering. Comparisons of changes in teachers’ incorporation of epistemic practices show some reflection of changes in their views about the nature of engineering knowledge. Comparisons suggest that they were able to design instruction with appropriate epistemic practices while not necessarily understanding related features of the nature of engineering.

The world has been fighting with the novel COVID-19 pandemic, which has scientific, societal, and ethical components, and thus it can be classified as one of the most challenging socio-scientific issues (SSI) of our era. The pandemic required individuals to make decisions on a variety of issues, and these decision-making processes are highly related to informal reasoning and individuals’ scientific literacy (SL). Thus, this paper aims to investigate the N = 26 pre-service biology teachers’ informal reasoning and decision-making modes within the real-time and dynamic COVID-19 pandemic context. The present study revealed that most of the participants made rationalistic based decisions about COVID-19 and social isolation. Moral-based decision-making, which is second-highest frequency among all decision-making modes, is also specific to COVID-19 and social isolation. Furthermore, the participants utilized different arguments while self-reasoning on the issue and convincing someone of their ideas about social isolation and COVID-19.