ABSTRACT

The available scientific evidence shows that, unless urgent and drastic action is taken, critical tipping points in the climate and the ecosystems that support human civilization may be crossed within our students’ lifetimes. In such a historical conjuncture, teaching and learning about sustainability can hardly be disentangled from affectivity and hope. What is our role as science educators when we teach about climate change at a time in which the window to a safe future is closing? What sort of dialogical spaces can we create that shall allow students to approach the climate crisis as a subject matter while preserving a sense of agency and hope? As part of the special issue Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, in this study, we investigate whether and the ways in which upper secondary students position themselves as meaningful actors when considering social, scientific, and technological solutions to the climate change problem in the context of science education. Building upon critical and cultural-historical perspectives, we theorize affect as inherently related to the development of societal, collective motives, and to how these motives become instantiated, made relevant, and addressed in situated practical activity through narratives and discourses about the past, present, and future. Drawing on interviews with upper-secondary school students, our analyzes identify formal contradictions that emerge in the students’ narratives and how these relate to equally contradictory affective configurations of hoping and caring. A lack of concrete pathways and understanding of the political dimensions of the climate crisis seem key to a prevalent lack of agency and hope.

ABSTRACT

For decades, science and engineering education researchers in the United States have sought to understand ways to realize more equitable, student-centered learning experiences within K-12 classrooms. One important line of research aligned to this aim has centered on opportunities for developing and supporting students’ epistemic agency, focusing on shifting epistemic agency away from residing solely in the teacher toward instead being enacted across the collaborative classroom community. Yet, despite extant research around this area of inquiry, little is known about how students negotiate epistemic agency amongst themselves. As research begins to delve into these critical student dynamics, we argue that the field must explicitly account for the varied powered relations ingrained within school spaces and how those relations impact students’ learning experiences. We then offer an illustrative example of student data to share a possible direction for critical analysis that could offer insight into such powered relations and how they play out and impact students’ epistemic agency, specifically through the concept of epistemic exclusion. Finally, we conclude with a call to action for educators and researchers.

ABSTRACT

As part of the special issue Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, we examined how placing emotion at the heart of climate change discussions can deepen and transform STEM learning environments. Using Community Science Data Talks (CSDTs)—a small-scale, justice-centered, flexible discourse routine—we supported teachers in engaging students with locally sourced data on climate justice issues. CSDTs consist of approximately 15–20 min classroom conversations prompted by local data visualizations and informed by guided emotion participation, critical place-based education, transformative experiences, justice-centered STEM, and dominant, critical, and affective pedagogical goals. Employing interaction analysis of 58 classroom videos from 15 classrooms across three iterations of the study, two countries, and 2 years of data collection, we documented how emotional pathways emerged when teachers explicitly invited students to share their emotions about local data during CDSTs (e.g., “How do these data make you feel?”). These invitations facilitated guided emotion participation through two distinct pathways, student-led or teacher-led, depending on context. Additionally, affective pedagogical goals enabled students' funds of knowledge and funds of feeling to publicly interact, fostering the development of constructive hope and critical civic empathy at the intersection of emotion, place, and climate justice. These findings underscore the importance of attending to emotion during STEM education to empathetically engage students in addressing local challenges and creating more just and sustainable communities.

ABSTRACT

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.

ABSTRACT

In this special issue, we feature scholarship focused on understanding the organizational context of science teacher learning. The special issue grew out of discussions among professional learning researchers and practitioners over the last several years that highlighted the following concerns: (a) that teacher learning in professional development showed up in vastly different ways in teachers' instructional practice; (b) that traditional research on the role of individual teacher traits (existing knowledge, skills, and beliefs) did not fully explain this variation; (c) that simply listing organizational features as barriers to teacher learning did not allow for a theoretical understanding of the interplay of teacher learning within organizations; and that (d) the existing literature that took up this interplay was not yet well known in the science education community. Together, these concerns signaled a need for a repertoire of work to support research and design practices that situate teacher learning within their organizations. The 14 original empirical and conceptual pieces that compose the special issue examine the ways teacher learning is shaped by the sociocultural and historical institutions of schooling that teachers work within and navigate as part of their daily practice. Teachers are positioned, not solely as conduits of reform nor as constrained actors within their organizational environment, but rather as agentive learners situated in complex contexts.

The work of this special issue mirrors the kinds of design features championed within the issue's articles. It began in scholarly relationships that were developed through mutual admiration, and germinated on a kayak trip during a conference in San Diego. The special issue grew and flourished through group gatherings at the National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST), culminating in a NARST invited poster session. Similar to the resources noted across many of the included studies, the collective learning featured in these articles was fostered through infrastructure (support from Science Education and NARST), a culture of collaboration (zoom sessions, group discussions of theory and methods), and relationships (mentoring, happy hours, laughing). This emergent process has culminated in a set of articles that examine, unpack, and challenge the concerns that sparked the special issue, providing new and innovative understandings. Enjoy!

ABSTRACT

From early on, families play a critical role in fostering their children's science development, particularly through shared interactions in the home science environment (HSE). The quality of these interactions is deemed pivotal for children's science learning. However, there is limited understanding regarding the quality of interactions between parents and children when exploring science together and how these interactions relate to children's science knowledge, motivation, and engagement. This study seeks to bridge these gaps by thoroughly investigating interaction quality in the context of shared book reading about an age-appropriate science topic among 61 parent-child pairs, taking a global perspective by focusing on three broader generic and domain-specific dimensions of interaction quality. The findings revealed that parents provided high-quality emotional-motivational but limited cognitive and science-specific support, varying greatly among families. Furthermore, parents' cognitive and science-specific support were associated with children's science knowledge. Emotional-motivational support was closely linked to children's engagement in science in the observed situation. However, relationships with children's science motivation exhibited mixed findings, with some positive associations observed with their enjoyment but no associations with their self-efficacy in science. These insights shed light on the role of interaction quality in the HSE, and which types of parental support are critical in shaping children's science learning. Future research could prioritize a more comprehensive investigation of interaction quality in the HSE to enhance the understanding of interaction quality and its impact on children's science development, potentially extending beyond the HSE to other pertinent contexts.

ABSTRACT

This study delves into the realm of student conceptual change, examining shifting understandings as important steppingstones on the path to sensemaking and canonical understanding in science education. It explores the potential of a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) curriculum, aiming to provide equitable learning opportunities, especially for emerging bilingual (EB) student populations. To achieve this, elementary school educators from randomly assigned schools received professional development training to implement a novel curriculum encompassing both STEM and STEAM (STEM + Arts) approaches to life science instruction. These approaches comprised: (1) an NGSS-aligned STEM unit employing inquiry-based science instruction; (2) an NGSS-aligned STEAM unit utilizing Arts-based science instruction instead of inquiry methods. The results indicated that a STEAM-first approach was most beneficial in helping students change from non-canonical conceptual understanding toward more nuanced canonical science knowledge. Specifically, for EB students, the STEAM-first approach showed even more promise, signifying its potential to bridge educational disparities. Furthermore, the study revealed that the integration of Arts as an instructional tool to teach science education played a pivotal role in enhancing the overall learning experience among students. Arts integration stimulated motivation, invigorated conceptual understanding, and offered unique avenues for elucidating complex scientific concepts and terminologies. This research contributes valuable insights for improving science education instruction, emphasizing the efficacy of conceptual change toward canonical scientific understanding through patterns of instructional sequencing of effective STEAM integration. It provides educators with evidence-based strategies to foster inclusive and equitable science learning experiences, ultimately guiding students toward deeper conceptual comprehension.

Science Education, Volume 109, Issue 2, Page 335-336, March 2025.

ABSTRACT

As part of the special issue Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, this paper examines the emergence and performance of hyperrationality in STEM classrooms. Hyperrationality describes verbal and embodied expressions whereby learners try to maintain an appearance of neutrality and emotional distance to give credence to political, socioscientific convictions, even under conditions where complete emotional detachment would be unconscionable. Hyperrationality in STEM learning environments poses a threat to human dignity (Espinoza et al. 2020) by reinscribing approaches to STEM that devalue the lives and lived experiences of those “othered”. We present a comparative analysis of cases taken from our respective (individual) studies focused on ethics, historicity, politics, and STEM learning. The first case is drawn from an undergraduate engineering ethics class discussion of militarized drones. The second case is from a year-long socioscientific unit on water enacted with Black children in a city wrestling with water shut-offs. In our analysis of these two cases, we consider how hyperrationality, the ungrievability of the other and racialized fear become components of interpretative repertoires that learners co-construct to compartmentalize and/or partially reconcile the inherent contradictions arising from these entanglements. Our cases evidence the emotional configurations of colonality that reinscribe imperialism, while also recognizing when/how nondominant communities resist these logics as they surface in STEM classrooms.

ABSTRACT

In STEM education, grit is increasingly the focus of research, with scholars and educators seeking to develop and test interventions that will enhance persistence. As part of the special issue Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, in this paper, we use interviews with 12 white physics faculty to show that physics culture has taken up the narrative that grit is key to success in the discipline. Using affective technology (Zembylas and Leonardo, 2013), habitus (Bourdieu, 1972/1977) and emotional habitus (Gould et al. 2019) as theoretical anchors, our analysis shows that grit, as described by faculty participants, is part-and-parcel of a white physics habitus. In other words, grit acts to reproduce systems of dominance through the internalization of a set of structures, symbols, and worldviews that produce embodied, affective responses, drawing dominant actors toward particular embodiments of hard work and turning them away from others. Thus, we argue that power in physics is mediated through affect and embodiment. Employing qualitative case study methods, we theorize how whiteness, in part, is reproduced in the discipline—how physics came to and continues to be a discipline where power is concentrated in the bodies of white males. We end by joining with existing calls to refuse grit, building from the work of STEM Scholars of Color who have called attention to the suffering that is endemic to notions of schooling and school science.

ABSTRACT

Although many students exhibit interest and demonstrate academic preparedness in math and science, a significant proportion of students do not major in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. These students encounter systemic barriers to STEM opportunities related to their intersecting gender and racial/ethnic identities. This study uses intersectionality theory and Tinto's model of student departure to explore students' academic and social experiences and investigate structural factors which restrict their access to STEM participation. Surveys and interviews with students from six universities in North Carolina revealed that STEM fields often fail to attract a broad range of students due to inadequate academic support and students' perceptions of these disciplines as unwelcoming or uninteresting. The findings offer practical recommendations for improving diversity in STEM majors and emphasize the critical need for universities to address diverse students' values and aspirations as well as actively promote the benefits and opportunities offered by science and STEM fields more broadly.

ABSTRACT

The article introduces a design-and-effects-framework comprising five key features of effective professional development: (1) extended Duration, (2) Content Focus of input, (3) Coherence of input with practice, (4) Collegial Participation, and (5) Active Learning. The framework's general feasibility is investigated in a proof-of-concept study. Additionally, the influence of a single key feature is addressed in a quasi-experimental effectiveness study. Object of study is a professional development programme on experimentation as a method of inquiry-based science teaching. Change variables to indicate effectiveness are (a) teachers' PCK, (b) their beliefs, and (c) their classroom practice. Two experimental conditions in the professional development programme differed in addressing Active Learning: one set of teachers used peer coaching, the other set of teachers was mentor-coached. All teachers (N = 36) visited three school-internal workshops; they were visited twice in their lessons and coached on their classroom practice regarding experimentation. All teachers completed performance tests and questionnaires; a subset of teachers was videotaped in two lessons containing an experiment. Analyses show that teachers benefitted in both formats regarding content knowledge, while pedagogical content knowledge on experimentation remains constant. Teachers' beliefs on experimentation as a method of inquiry-based science teaching improved without favouring either of the conditions. Regarding classroom practice changes surface concerning opening experimentation as well as allocation of time on phases of experimentation. Overall, classroom practice appears to be robust towards change. While peer coaching teachers develop somewhat more advantageous, the gain appears disproportionate to the added administerial effort of actualising this format.

ABSTRACT

This study examines the impact of a single science museum visit on the science self-efficacy (SSE) of emerging adult learners. Building upon previous research, which showed a significant short-term impact of a museum visit on SSE, our study aims to replicate these findings and gain deeper insights into the underlying mechanisms contributing to increased SSE. In the present study, we implemented a randomized control trial design and hired a recruitment firm to ensure a representative sample through quota sampling. Participants were randomly assigned to either visit a museum (Treatment) or see a movie (Control). In addition to visiting their assigned excursion, participants completed pre-, post-, and delayed-post-surveys and a virtual interview. Results demonstrate that visiting a science museum had a significant positive short-term impact on SSE. Moreover, the museum visit led to an increase in SSE by broadening visitors’ perceptions of what counted as science. Although no significant longer-term impact on SSE was observed, participants who visited the museum maintained a broadened view of science even 3 months later. Interviews further revealed that positive performance interpretations during the museum visit, which were often achieved by participants exploring conceptually-accessible, hands-on exhibits at their own pace, played a vital role in enhancing SSE. Participants also described how the museum visit broadened their view of science by connecting science and daily activities. Implications of these findings for informal science education practitioners and directions for future research are discussed.

ABSTRACT

A longstanding failure to achieve racial and ethnic equity in STEM doctoral programs in the United States exists alongside a research landscape struggling to comprehensively explain this enduring failure. Towards a comprehensive explanatory model of STEM doctoral persistence and disruption of this failure, I previously proposed critical capital theory (CCT). CCT integrates critical race theory, forms of capital, and fictive kinship. Using a small-scale critical qualitative abductive study, I explored the extent to which CCT explained participants' experiences and their science doctoral program outcomes. Narratives of factors influencing doctoral persistence were interpreted from interviews of 3 female former science doctoral students from racially and ethnically marginalized communities. They experienced immediate, intense, and sustained overlapping forms of oppression in their doctoral programs. To cope, all activated different forms of capital including non-Bourdieuan forms. However, oppressive tactics used by faculty and administrators devalued their capital including supposedly high value Bourdieuan forms, constrained their ability to form fictive kinships within departmental networks, and negatively impacted their mental health and allegiances to science. To explain these findings, which align with other studies, I expand CCT to incorporate intersectionality and community cultural wealth and refined it to explicitly link capital, field, and habitus. Although the study's scale is small, these findings underscore the potential of CCT as an increasingly comprehensive tool to examine and explain STEM doctoral persistence. Further exploration across diverse STEM disciplines and contexts is needed to refine and generalize CCT, optimizing its utility to disrupt enduring inequities in STEM doctoral programs.

ABSTRACT

Elementary teacher educators endeavor to prepare prospective elementary teachers to teach science in ways which best support student learning. A well-documented challenge in teacher education is the disconnect between theory and practice which many programs have worked to overcome. One framework which has been used in many teacher preparation programs is practice-based teacher education which consists of three-parts: representation, decomposition, and approximations of practice. This framework has been studied in a number of contexts, but the ways in which prospective teachers recompose practice have not been fully explored. In this study, I examined the science teaching of three student teachers enrolled in the same teacher education program to understand how they enacted teaching practices from their teacher education coursework. Findings showed that each student teacher adopted a different, singular practice as their primary guide for teaching science rather than a more integrated and recomposed approach. This suggests that a more explicit focus on recomposition of practice is a necessary part of teacher education.

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to understand the actions carried out for dialog between science centers and science museums with the public of local communities living in a situation of socioeconomic vulnerability. The study adopted a quantitative and qualitative approach and the theoretical framework of science communication, of the exercise of citizenship and of engagement with science, using concepts such as Technoscientific Citizenship, Social Appropriation of Science and Technology, and Science Capital. Also, a few previous visitor studies on the same purpose of inclusion and social equity were considered. The methodology involved the participation of professionals who work in Brazilian institutions, in two stages of data collection, both carried out online. Initially, a questionnaire was answered by 69 professionals, of whom nine took part in in-depth interviews. The qualitative data was analyzed using the Discourse of the Collective Subject (DCS) method, from which the results have been presented in three Categories and twelve Synthesis-Speeches. The establishment of a dialog with a broader public involves taking on a long-term institutional commitment, developing broad access mechanisms with respect to cultural differences. It is fundamental to make constant and careful efforts to welcome a diverse public and meet the challenge of breaking down prejudices. The implementation of the social role of science centers and science museums not only democratize knowledge but promotes a freedom feeling and the raise of self-esteem of those who engage in its activities. The results corroborated previous studies, stating that to build a legacy and to foster significant changes in the profile of the audience, the social exclusion needs to be treated as a structural, complex, and multifaceted issue.

ABSTRACT

For decades, two critical challenges have plagued school science in the years it is compulsory for students in many educational contexts across the globe: how best to identify what science is meaningful for all students to learn during their formal school science education, and how to keep these students engaged in the learning of this science. Diverse science curriculum movements over these decades and throughout the English-speaking world have provided different conceptualizations about the science content and process students should learn, and suggested many pedagogical practices to engage students in that learning. However, the two intertwined challenges of specific concern for this article clearly remain: what science to include and how to foster student engagement with that science. In this paper, we first seek to provide insights relevant to these two challenges via reviews of extant research in three quite broad and important areas of scholarship: (a) the concepts of imagination and creativity, considered particularly through current cultural-historical approaches to early years science learning; (b) the long-standing support around the globe for a range of inquiry-based approaches; and (c) the German constructs of Didaktik and Bildung as existing paths from a non-Anglo context that assist the determination of choices of science for curriculum inclusion or rejection. We then consider how these three discussions can lead to considerations of school science curriculum that better address the two challenges. Though simple solutions for these complex and multifaceted challenges are unlikely and beyond the aim of this paper, interrelated aspects of our three discussions point to curriculum-focussed initiatives focussing on “big ideas” as a way to determine content. We conclude by briefly illustrating these considerations via the example of school science curriculum structured via the big ideas of science: that is, those that are argued to be fundamental to the learner over the course of their compulsory science education.

ABSTRACT

Even though virtual labs help students learn science content, little is known about how well students can later apply this learning to other contexts or tasks when compared to students who performed physical labs. The goal of this study was to understand how students who perform physical versus virtual labs were able to later apply what they learn to a new context and a more intricate physical lab. We also explored whether reducing the complexity of the physical lab, by setting up the apparatus before students conducted experiments, supported students' learning of physics concepts and relationships when compared to students who performed a virtual lab. Using a quasi-experimental research design, we randomly assigned 26, seventh and eighth grade classes from seven teachers' classes into two conditions, the virtual or pre-set-up physical pulley lab conditions. Using data collected from 385 students and 188 groups, we found that students who were in the virtual lab condition learned significantly more about the mechanics of pulleys than students in the physical lab condition as assessed by a content knowledge pre to posttest. We also found that students in the virtual condition performed better on answering and explaining a real-world scenario application question and took no longer to set up a more complex pulley system in small groups than students in the physical condition. We discuss limitations, implications, and directions for future research.

ABSTRACT

Teachers are members of school district organizations that have their own organizational culture and climate. We differentiate a school or district as an organizational cultural context from the broader community cultural context or individual sociocultural background; it stands as an intermediate context with effects that may differ from the external cultural influences while having profound influences on teachers’ thoughts, feelings, and actions. In this conceptual paper, we review the theoretical foundations of organizational culture and organizational climate, and the corresponding ideas of assumptions, values, artifacts, and shared perceptions of policies, practices, and routines. We then summarize types of research questions and research methods that are well-suited to the organizational culture and climate framework. We apply these concepts to two example cases from the field of science education. We identify potential research opportunities for organizational culture and climate in science education that can extend and deepen our efforts to understand teachers’ experiences within school organizations. This paper is part of the special issue on Teacher Learning and Practice within Organizational Contexts.

ABSTRACT

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.