ABSTRACT

The modern information landscape offers an abundance of options to learn about science topics, but it is also ripe for the spread of mis- and disinformation and science denial. Science education can play a pivotal role in mitigating harm from untruthful information, strengthening trust in science, and fostering a more informed and critically engaged public. Across the articles in this special issue, 10 pedagogical strategies to address mis- and disinformation in the classroom were synthesized. These strategies include: acknowledging the social nature of knowledge and building epistemic networks, addressing mis- and disinformation directly, building Nature of Science (NOS) knowledge, ensuring topics are socially relevant and meaningful, modeling critical evaluation of how power and privilege influence information, offering multiple sources of information, offering opportunities for students to reflect, providing explicit instruction on how to evaluate information, supporting the development of scientific reasoning skills, and supporting student perspective-taking. In addition, areas for future research were identified. In particular, more foundational research is needed to understand the complex interactions between social identities and information processing. From this knowledge base, more applied research is needed to create effective educational interventions to address mis- and disinformation.

ABSTRACT

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.

ABSTRACT

There have been several attempts to conceptualize and operationalize pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in the context of teachers' professional competencies. A recent and popular model is the Refined Consensus Model (RCM), which proposes a framework of dispositional competencies (personal PCK—pPCK) that influence more action-related competencies (enacted PCK—ePCK) and vice versa. However, descriptions of the internal structure of pPCK and possible knowledge domains that might develop independently are still limited, being either primarily theoretically motivated or strictly hierarchical and therefore of limited use, for example, for formative feedback and further development of the RCM. Meanwhile, a non-hierarchical differentiation for the ePCK regarding the plan-teach-reflect cycle has emerged. In this study, we present an exploratory computational approach to investigate pre-service teachers' pPCK for a similar non-hierarchical structure using a large dataset of responses to a pPCK questionnaire (N=846$$ N=846 $$). We drew on theoretical foundations and previous empirical findings to achieve interpretability by integrating this external knowledge into our analyses using the Computational Grounded Theory (CGT) framework. The results of a cluster analysis of the pPCK scores indicate the emergence of prototypical groups, which we refer to as competency profiles: (1) a group with low performance, (2) a group with relatively advanced competency in using pPCK to create instructional elements, (3) a group with relatively advanced competency in using pPCK to assess and analyze described instructional elements, and (4) a group with high performance. These groups show tendencies for certain language usage, which we analyze using a structural topic model in a CGT-inspired pattern refinement step. We verify these patterns by demonstrating the ability of a machine learning model to predict the competency profile assignments. Finally, we discuss some implications of the results for the further development of the RCM and their potential usability for an automated formative assessment.

ABSTRACT

Informal science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning (ISL) can remain inequitable when discourse and practices in ISL spaces position youth as temporary guests by implicitly or explicitly sidelining youths' experiences, community wisdom, cultures, and histories. The framework of rightful presence problematizes guest–host relationalities that delimit youths' rights in learning spaces. It calls for educators' disruptive and transformative practices in support of youths reauthoring rights toward co-creating equitable learning opportunities. This study explored how such practices emerge from educators' routine ISL instructions. Using comparative constant analysis of data generated from a larger research–practice partnership project in regional ISL settings, we identified three practices that differed in how educators supported rightful presence through engaging youths in ISL design: (1) educator-designed space making; (2) taking-up youths' disruption and reorganizing ISL opportunities; (3) co-creating new ISL opportunities. Practice 1 primarily focused on fostering disciplinary and social engagement, often prompting educators to further enact Practice 2 or 3. Practice 2 or 3 made space not only for youths' equitable access to educator-designed ISL but also for reconfiguring power relationalities with youths for reauthoring ISL opportunities. Our findings suggest that support for rightful presence can begin from ordinary educator-designed ISL practices but should also seek to disrupt the ordinariness with youths. We discuss findings, including how Practices 2 and 3 can be more purposefully enacted in the ISL curricular and structural planning phase, moving beyond their emergence as a follow-up on Practice 1. Implications are considered regarding the role of STEM education research and practice in support of youths' presence as rightful participants, re-organizers, and constructors of their ISL opportunities and futures.

Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Volume 62, Issue 3, Page 627-628, March 2025.

ABSTRACT

Scientific modeling is a core practice of scientific inquiry. Students' engagement in modeling can be enhanced by attending to epistemic criteria, which in science are standards used to evaluate the validity and accuracy of scientific models. While prior research has focused on students' development and use of epistemic criteria in scientific inquiry environments, less is known about students' metacognitive knowledge about why epistemic criteria matter—their metacognitive epistemic justifications. Investigating students' metacognitive knowledge of criteria can reveal their understandings of the criteria guiding scientific practice (such as modeling), their relative value, and their relationship to epistemic products. We present findings from clinical interviews of student dyads conducted at the end of the implementation of a fifth-grade model-based inquiry unit in which the class developed and used epistemic criteria for scientific models. Students' justifications of epistemic criteria revealed their metacognitive knowledge about why criteria, such as evidentiary fit, are important in modeling practice. We also identified themes in students' justifications for the relative importance of different epistemic criteria and the role such justifications played in resolving disagreements about epistemic matters. Our findings illustrate the potential value of engaging students in discourse about metacognitive justifications for epistemic criteria.

ABSTRACT

Resiliency has been unearthed as a phenomenon to explore strategies that influence successful STEM-CS matriculation and/or persistence among minoritized populations—particularly Black undergraduate students. We argue that understanding and solidifying a definition for resilience in STEM-CS can aid in identifying key characteristics that reveal systemic structures and improve academic achievement. In this commentary, we use critical race theory (CRT) to unpack how resiliency can be adjusted and revamped to focus more on systemic issues, rather than on individual or small groups of students to showcase “grit” and immense inner strength in STEM-CS environments. Three noteworthy assertions are generated to help us trouble resilience relative to Black STEM-CS students and teachers in higher education.

ABSTRACT

Computational thinking (CT) is becoming increasingly important for K-12 science education, thus warranting new integrations of CT and science content. This intervention study integrated CT through unplugged, or handwritten, algorithmic explanations of natural selection. As students investigated natural selection in varying contexts (specific and context-general), students created explanations based on evidence of natural selection by using algorithm concepts and engaging in CT practices. Students' CT learning over time was analyzed through algorithmic explanations created during the unit. Research questions guiding the investigation were: (1) How do students learn CT over the course of a CT and science integrated unit? (2) What are students' perspectives of learning CT in an integrated unit? (3) How do students come to think about CT and its applications? Students' CT competencies significantly increased from pre- to post-unit. Students indicated creating algorithmic explanations helped them learn natural selection and develop CT competencies. At the end of the unit, students recognized the universal application of CT as a way to logically and clearly explain processes. Implications of this work are that CT can be used as a science practice that helps students simultaneously learn science and CT practice competencies. Moreover, these student learning outcomes can be achieved with unplugged, or computer-free, CT.

ABSTRACT

Inclusivity in education is one of the fundamental objectives of the Swedish national curriculum for compulsory schooling. The accessibility of STEM education to students of different genders is essential in achieving this objective. This paper studies the images Swedish and Finnish upper secondary schools used to promote their university preparatory educational orientations, applying discourse analysis to the body of images. As the discourses imbue the orientations, certain positions are enabled for pupils. These positions prescribe who and what is seen as natural in the orientations. We find substantial differences in how the discourses are represented in the orientations. In the STEM orientations, pupils are constructed as less social than the other orientations. In the images from the technology programme, female pupils have a higher representation than actual enrolment, but in these images, they are less active than their male peers. Moreover, the female technology pupil is positioned as engaged with more creative technology subfields while their male peers engage with electronic experiments. This positioning of the female technology pupil is rather conditioning her presence than creating an attractive educational trajectory for her to assume.

ABSTRACT

Gender differences in creative thinking competency, career interest, and situated expectancy-value beliefs in STEM, have been widely studied separately. This study brings these lines of research together by examining gender differences in the association between adolescents' perceived opportunities for creative thinking, creative thinking competency belief, and career interest in STEM, as well as the mediating role of STEM situated expectancy-value beliefs. Results from structural equation models (SEMs) with 737 middle/high school students attending the Prefreshman Engineering Program (PREP) in the Southwestern United States showed that perceived opportunities for creative thinking in STEM education settings were positively associated with creative thinking competency belief and career interest in STEM, after controlling for pre-measures and background characteristics. Multigroup SEM analyses indicated that there were no significant gender differences in the relationship between perceived opportunities for creative thinking in STEM and the two examined STEM outcomes in our student sample. A set of mediation analyses demonstrated that STEM expectancy belief, intrinsic value, and utility value serve as key mediators linking perceived opportunities for creative thinking in STEM to student STEM outcomes. However, only the indirect effect of perceived opportunities for creative thinking in STEM on creative thinking competency belief through STEM expectancy belief was significant for both girls and boys. The mediating effects of STEM intrinsic value on both outcomes and the mediating effect of STEM utility value on STEM career interest were only significant for boys and not girls. Taken together, the findings of this study advance our understanding of the benefits of opportunities for creative thinking in STEM for middle/high school students and the underlying mechanisms by which creative-supporting contexts have influence on students STEM outcomes differently for girls and boys.

ABSTRACT

Higher education institutions commonly provide faculty professional development (PD) in teaching and learning, with the goal of enhancing student outcomes by improving instructional quality. Yet few existing studies link PD participation with student outcome measures. Empirical evidence on the impact of PD on student performance in higher education, particularly in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education is limited. Using institutional data from a large state university in California, we address this gap by estimating the impact of two online PD programs on student performance: an asynchronous program about developing online courses, open to faculty from all disciplines; and a synchronous program designed exclusively for STEM faculty, concentrating on STEM-specific challenges and active learning strategies in online instruction. Using a difference-in-difference approach, our results indicate that both PD programs improved student grades, while only the STEM-specific PD improved DFW rates and addressed equity gaps. To explain the difference in results between the two PD programs, we invoke a theoretical model positing that to improve student outcomes, faculty PD must teach strategies known to improve student performance, it must teach that content in ways known to improve faculty learning, and it must support faculty as they implement new strategies.

ABSTRACT

Interest in science is critical for science learning. The family plays a major role in supporting the development of children's interest in science by eliciting and fostering interest and engagement with science content and practice. This study characterizes triggers for interest in science in everyday family life and measures the duration of resulting engagement manifesting situational interest. In an insider researcher-ethnography of one family, we collected video and audio recordings of science-related interactions using fixed 24/7 audio and video cameras in the house and Go-Pro cameras outdoors. We identified 397 science interest-triggering events and classified them along three dimensions: (1) the connection between the stimulus and the object of interest (direct, indirect, or unidentified); (2) the design of the stimulus (designed or undesigned); (3) the attention to the stimulus (self-noticed or mediated). We found most triggers were direct (87%) and undesigned (82%), and they were equally mediated and self-noticed (50%–50%). Moreover, although designed triggers were relatively rare, they elicited longer situational interest than undesigned triggers. Interaction analysis of two illustrative events showed that this difference was related not only to features of the trigger design but also to the way participants co-constructed the interaction around it. The study's findings underscore the significance of developing targeted triggers for science learning in family contexts and providing parents with practical strategies to leverage undesigned triggers.

ABSTRACT

Exploring the factors influencing science teacher professional development (STPD) and their interactions may provide insight into promoting professional development and improving science education. However, existing research mainly focuses on STPD in larger domains, such as individual, external, and contextual, without paying systematic attention to the connections between internal elements within domains. Therefore, this study utilized the cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) as a framework to systematically explore the interactions between factors influencing STPD. Content analysis was used to identify the factors influencing STPD. Subsequently, we adopted a convergent parallel mixed research method, aiming at a more comprehensive exploration of how these factors affect STPD. The interpretive structural model (ISM) and cross-influence matrix multiplication (MICMAC) method were used to explore the interrelationships among the factors. Furthermore, from the CHAT perspective, semi-structured interviews were used to identify the tensions in STPD. The ISM results showed that the factors influencing STPD have a six-level hierarchical structure. Level 1 represents factors that directly influence STPD. The influences at Level 1 were also directly or indirectly influenced by the factors at Levels 2–6. The primary and secondary contradictions in STPD were identified by integrating the MICMAC and interview results under the CHAT lens. This study established that ISM and MICMAC not only identifies the hierarchical relationship between the influencing factors but also better identifies the contradictions between and within different types of factors from the perspective of CHAT. Based on our results, we suggest a focus on professional practice and learning communities, rural and remote school teachers, and efficient use of technology to connect experts, teacher trainers, and peer groups to improve the reach and efficacy of STPD.

ABSTRACT

This study examines the demographics, qualifications, and turnover of STEM teachers in Kansas and Missouri—two contiguous, predominantly rural states in the Midwestern region of the United States. The existing literature lacks detailed insights regarding U.S. STEM teachers, especially with recent economic and social changes over the COVID-19 pandemic, and there is particularly limited evidence regarding STEM teachers in the U.S. Midwest. Utilizing large-scale administrative longitudinal data, we filled part of this gap by documenting the characteristics and turnover patterns of STEM teachers in Kansas and Missouri over a 13-year period, from 2010 through 2023. Our analysis shows declining trends among young and early-career STEM teachers, STEM certification, and rising STEM teacher turnover, especially post-COVID-19. We found particularly high turnover rates in urban schools and schools with the highest shares of students of color and poverty. We also found numerous factors of STEM teacher turnover, including salary and employment in schools serving high percentages of minoritized and low-income students, as well as differential turnover patterns among school geographical circumstances. This work is the first comprehensive examination of STEM teachers in Kansas and Missouri. We offer insights into the teacher workforce of the traditionally overlooked U.S. Midwest. Our results suggest important policy implications for sustaining a diverse and qualified STEM teacher workforce in the U.S. amid post-COVID-19 social changes, thereby informing decision making at state and national levels that aim to foster equitable access to high-quality STEM education among students in diverse contexts, while contributing to the U.S.'s long-term economic growth, sustainability, and the world's advancement of STEM education.

Abstract

Engineering design entails making value-laden judgments against ill-defined, ambiguous, and/or competing sociotechnical criteria. In this article, we argue that such conditions make engineering designers particularly susceptible to the potentially deleterious effects of mis/disinformation in the processes and practices of engineering design, their engagement with people and communities, and in the production and evaluations of the artifacts they produce. We begin by critiquing dominant approaches to engineering design education, specifically, engineering education's social-technical dualism and the ubiquitous ideology of depoliticization, which has exacerbated the effects of mis/disinformation in engineering design. We follow by outlining a framework for developing students' capacity for mitigating its effects in the specific context of engineering design thinking and making value-laden engineering judgments and decision-making. We envision three areas of opportunity for engineering design education to teach students strategies for navigating these challenges when engaging with (a) the processes and practices of engineering, which reflect the unique types of information students engage with across the design process, (b) people and their communities, including the strategic and careful performance of activities for gathering information, while mitigating the harms to misinformation and disinformation and maximizing the benefits of community involvement, and (c) the social and technical criteria of engineering design outcomes in the form of artifacts (e.g., products, processes).

Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Volume 62, Issue 2, Page 389-390, February 2025.

Abstract

A longstanding and significant disparity in representation across gender, economic status, ethnicity, race, and sexual identity exists within STEM doctoral training. Most of the research on the retention and attrition of minoritized PhD STEM students focuses on individual factors, rather than system level issues. To address these gaps, we qualitatively examined longitudinal experiences of 33 Asian American, Black, and Latiné female biomedical PhD students, using a structural violence framework. The researchers developed three themes: (1) institutional hostility toward core aspects of identity; (2) the importance of intersectionality and within-group variation in experiences with structural violence; and (3) students' growing awareness of structural violence in training. Findings have significant implications for the structure of doctoral training and interventions to create equitable training environments.

Abstract

In this study, Q methodology was used to identify 16 secondary school physics, chemistry, and biology teachers' views on competences in education for sustainable development (ESD). Our data collection instrument was grounded in the GreenComp competence framework developed by the European Commission. We captured three different viewpoints through by-person factor analysis. The largest group, with nine science teachers, prioritized promoting evidence-based instruction while avoiding the political, ethical, or value-laden dilemmas inherent in sustainability issues. While they advocated addressing critical thinking and system thinking, their reasons for avoiding the dilemmas varied. Some teachers feared that addressing such dilemmas might lead to preaching their own values to students, while others felt unprepared or believed that science should remain objective and value-free. The second largest group, with four science teachers, emphasize promoting nature and its well-being above all other competences. Unlike the dominant group, this group of science teachers held themselves responsible for encouraging students to care for nature and to change their attitudes to behave more sustainably. The third group of teachers stood out by advocating fostering collective action in science education. While all teachers agreed on the importance of promoting foundational scientific knowledge, they also agreed on excluding politics from science education. This stance was influenced by internal factors, such as their perception of science as empirical, their perceived role as transmitters of scientific knowledge, and a lack of expertise. In total, 12 out of the 16 teachers who participated in our study suggested that subjects such as history are more suitable for addressing certain ESD competences. Additionally, external factors, such as the role of parents and assessments, were cited as potential reasons to dismiss certain ESD competences in science education.

Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Volume 62, Issue 1, Page 1-2, January 2025.

Abstract

Equity-focused calls for elementary education reform recognize the importance of student and teacher translanguaging, yet nuances of how this process unfolds in early childhood science is an underexplored area. This study examines young plurilingual children's participation in science investigations, with a view toward understanding how open-ended pedagogical structures supported their communication and engagement as related to science learning. We examine the work of 4- to 6-year-olds as they participated in a 3-week unit exploring worms and draw upon translanguaging theoretical perspectives to interpretively analyze their interactions in science. Situated in the multilingual national context of Luxembourg, the study examines the interactions of these plurilingual children and their teacher as they investigated worms in varied open-ended pedagogical structures. Schools are trilingual in Luxembourg, yet approximately half of the students in the country's elementary schools do not come to school with proficiency in any of the three languages of instruction. Issues of equity in schooling are thus heavily bound in languages. The robust dataset incorporating video data were examined using multimodal interaction analysis, and three vignettes zoom in on children's actions, utterances, and materials in open-ended science learning spaces, providing rich examples of classroom structures that support meaningful translanguaging through students' agentic science communication. Young students' communication and science engagement are inseparable, and this study shows that these intertwine through translanguaging, in a process which is emergent when children are able to agentically draw upon diverse resources to make meanings.