Science & Education最新文献

This study examines the impact of a 90-h apprenticeship on Thai preservice science teachers’ confidence and understanding of nature of science (NOS). Twenty-eight participants, specializing in physics, chemistry, biology, or general science, engaged in a hands-on apprenticeship under practicing scientists. To evaluate NOS, pre- and post-apprenticeship assessments were conducted using a 5-point Likert scale to measure participants’ confidence in NOS tenets, while the VNOS Form C, which focuses on understanding of NOS tenets, was administered only post-apprenticeship. Pre-apprenticeship, participants exhibited moderate confidence in NOS, particularly in areas related to creativity and the socio-cultural aspects of science. After the apprenticeship including reflective discussion, significant improvements were observed. Post-apprenticeship survey results showed strong agreement across all NOS tenets, with mode values of 5 and significantly reduced quartile ranges (IQRs), indicating greater consensus among participants. A Wilcoxon signed-rank test revealed that participants’ median total score was significantly higher than the threshold score of 12 (V = 133.5, p = 0.0067), indicating enhanced NOS comprehension. These findings suggest that experiential learning, such as apprenticeships, plays a critical role in shaping preservice teachers’ confidence and understanding of NOS by bridging theoretical concepts with real-world scientific practices. This study emphasizes the need for integrating both authentic scientific experiences and explicit NOS discussion in teacher education programs to foster a well-rounded understanding of nature of science.

Although there is a push to provide more student agency in science classrooms, teachers and students may become frustrated when inquiry activities and equipment do not work as planned—teachers because of the time crunch to “cover” topics and students because of the perceived lack of value in activities that are “off task.” In classroom implementations of a data-rich high school physics activity sequence as part of the InquirySpace 2 (IS2) project, numerous episodes of equipment troubleshooting were observed. Teachers questioned whether the time spent had disciplinary value. Students expressed concern regarding what, if anything, they were learning. This qualitative case study of one such episode considers students' activity in terms of their engagement with the “mangle of practice” and misalignments between their conceptual and material worlds, their exercise of epistemic agency in recognizing and repairing those misalignments, and their epistemic affect during and after the activity. Video analysis revealed all three aspects deeply intertwined with evidence of student engagement in multiple science practices. The students expressed their feelings about the episode immediately afterward and the teacher and IS2 observer when interviewed much later, at the end of the project. One reason for the negative perceptions of teacher and students may be that the alignments being explored were related to the instrumentation more than to the target phenomenon. This study argues that in such situations, students may not recognize or value science practices that emerge, and may need explicit support to reframe their activity as valid scientific practice.

Previous studies have revealed that preservice science teachers (PSTs) require more robust and stimulating opportunities to engage with and reflect on formative assessment (FA) during teacher education. From a sociocultural-asset perspective, 16 PSTs participated in a co-design process with researchers, engaging in an iterative reasoning and development process of an FA-embedded chemistry laboratory learning environment through the conjecture mapping approach over the course of a semester. This case study presents how a randomly selected small group of PSTs (N = 4) implemented the co-designed FA practices for one of the most challenging chemistry topics, chemical equilibrium, in a laboratory setting in the subsequent semester. Several data collection tools, such as audio records and artifacts from the PSTs' FA enactment in their laboratory investigation, were used in this study. All triangulated data was analyzed using the method of interaction analysis to generate and interpret meanings. Findings revealed that the PSTs could implement FA by interweaving five key FA strategies to enhance their learning in the chemistry laboratory. Specifically, the findings showed that not only the content and quality of feedback but also the way feedback is used and interacted with in FA play a critical role in improving the PSTs' learning and performance. This study has implications for designing and testing FA-embedded learning environments that must be created with, not for, PSTs from sociocultural-asset perspectives to improve the quality of FA.

Since its launch in November 2022, Chat Generative Pretrained Transformer (ChatGPT) has rapidly become an attractive artificial intelligence (AI) tool for students around the globe. This chatbot is becoming more and more popular because of its ability to generate science-related texts practically indistinguishable from human-produced texts. While a major shortcoming of texts generated by ChatGPT is that these can contain false and/or inaccurate scientific information, very little is known about how to promote critical reading of science-related texts produced by this AI tool. We aimed at showing that the construction of scientific argument maps—visual representation of scientific argument structure—can be used to foster critical reading of these texts. The data were drawn from the argument diagrams constructed by 44 undergraduates (27 females and 17 males, 17–23 years old) during an introductory science course and audio recordings of student discussions as part of the process of co-creation of argument maps. The findings suggest that argument mapping effectively supported participants’ critical reading of ChatGPT‐generated texts while engaged them in the construction of arguments, the anticipation of counterarguments, and the production of rebuttals. This study contributes to the literature on scientific AI literacy—the combination of scientific literacy with AI literacy —by providing insights into how to engage students in the critical reading of science-related texts produced by generative AI technology.