Science & Education最新文献

This commentary highlights the urgent need to re-envision climate and environmental education in response to the escalating climate crisis and its far-reaching social, ecological, and political implications. As young people increasingly express concern for their futures, the authors call for a transformational change in science education that engages with climate change as a complex and pressing issue. To support such transformation, the commentary introduces a new section in the journal Science Education titled “Climate Change and Environmental Education,” providing a platform for empirical research, conceptual inquiries, and policy discourse on education's role in addressing planetary change. This section invites scholarship that expands our understanding of climate change and environmental education through transdisciplinary and justice-oriented approaches. Key areas of inquiry include learning across spaces, disciplines, and epistemologies, action-oriented learning through community-based and participatory approaches, and attending to emotional well-being while using action to cultivate hope. By advancing these conversations, researchers can critically examine how education fosters the knowledge, agency, and ethical commitments necessary for engaging with the complexities of climate change.

Evolution is challenging to understand for students. Frequently, students hold coexisting intuitive conceptions based on cognitive biases and scientific conceptions of evolution. For the self-regulation of intuitive and scientific conceptions, metacognitive awareness is fundamental. However, students are mostly unaware of their conceptions. A criteria-referenced self-assessment of one's intuitive and scientific conceptions is one way to develop this metacognitive awareness and enhance conceptual knowledge. We investigated in a study with N = 432 upper secondary students how accurate students are in self-assessing intuitive and scientific conceptions of evolution, which possible explanations for inaccurate self-assessments exist, and which variables are related to self-assessment accuracy (e.g., prior conceptual knowledge, metaconceptual awareness and regulation, and self-efficacy). We found that self-assessment accuracy was moderate, with students self-assessing more intuitive and scientific conceptions than present. Possible explanations for inaccurate self-assessments were incorrect understandings of concepts, excessive self-assessments (of an intuitive concept in a context where it is appropriate; of a scientific concept despite incompleteness), and mix-ups of concepts. Self-assessment accuracy was predicted mainly by prior conceptual knowledge in terms of scientific conceptions and, in some analyses, by prior conceptual knowledge in terms of intuitive conceptions and self-efficacy. The findings have important implications for using self-assessment to develop metaconceptual awareness, for adjusting self-assessments to students' preconditions (e.g., prior knowledge), and for designing teaching approaches in evolution and science education.

Having a sense of belonging can promote persistence in the STEM fields, but less is known about what it means to develop that sense of belonging. To investigate this phenomenon, we conducted semi-structured interviews with a cohort of STEM students (n = 10) nearing graduation at an urban university regarding their sense of belonging and qualitatively coded the interviews using thematic analysis. Results revealed that all interviewed students clearly articulated feelings of belonging, making them an ideal population from which to learn more. We applied two frameworks to guide our understanding of what factors promoted the development of a sense of belonging for these students: the Network Theory of Social Capital and the Counterspaces Framework. The students described their experiences in relation to elements of social capital and counterspace processes as they reflected on the development of feelings of belonging. One element of social capital, “reinforcement,” or assurance and recognition of one's worthiness as a member of a group, was the most prevalent element of social capital influencing the participants' development of a sense of belonging. “Direct relational transactions,” or the exchange of resources within a community, was the most prevalent counterspace process discussed by the participants. Our findings expand the utility and add to the theoretical underpinnings of the two frameworks, indicating that gaining social capital and experiencing counterspaces can contribute to undergraduate STEM student development of a sense of belonging.

The vast and rapidly growing amount of science education research makes it challenging for researchers to navigate and synthesize developments across the field, particularly concerning broad concepts evolving along divergent paths. To address this issue, a novel review methodology employing bibliometrics and network analysis was tested to identify and characterize clusters of research focused on the relationship between school-based science learning and contexts where that science is applied, experienced, observable, or otherwise relevant (e.g., socio-scientific inquiry, place-based learning, culturally-responsive pedagogy). Using a sample of 935 academic papers, the bibliometric network analysis revealed the landscape of contextualized science learning research, identifying 13 distinct clusters of scholarship. Bibliometric and qualitative data were used to describe the research trends within clusters and confirm they were conceptually meaningful and distinct. This methodology facilitated greater understanding of how research can become clustered into “invisible colleges” over time, offering a synthesis approach to grasp interrelated lines of research within an evolving landscape. The methodology has potential to identify other schools of thought or overarching themes in science education, enhancing researchers’ ability to perceive the field as a coherent landscape of interconnected ideas or to identify specific research trajectories within a broad concept.