This study presents a disappointing account of Spanish secondary school students’ knowledge and understanding of the causes and consequences of climate change. Many of the key factors responsible for climate change are not recognized, whilst significant socioeconomic consequences of climate change, for example, increasing migration and food shortages, are rarely acknowledged.
Transitioning from textbook-style problems to ""real-world"" physics problem-solving requires participants to set limiting assumptions. In textbook-style questions these assumptions aren't necessary because all the numerical values are provided by the textbook. However, in real-world challenges this is often not the case. The article has implications for educators who are thinking about how to use real-world problems in their work.
This paper examines students' perspectives on a science enrichment programme led by a university-based science outreach initiative. Few studies have previously examined the impact of such experiences from the student perspective. Findings suggest carefully designed out-of-school inquiry programmes broaden students' experiences of science, particularly for those from under-resourced schools. The paper includes a checklist of conditions for success for out-of-school inquiry programmes which may be of interest to ISE educators.
This study outlines the learning goals, expectations, and perceived outcomes of a zoo field trip from the perspective of students, classroom teachers, and informal educators. They find, among other things, that that students most highly valued the social aspects of the field trip – opportunities to be with their friends and to discuss the field trip events with their friends. They also find that informal educators did not quite understand the needs or interests of the students and therefore missed opportunities to engage students with the science in the zoo. The authors close with several
The authors of this paper address the question of what it looks like when scientific ideas are collectively shared and developed in a classroom and how student discourse actions contribute to that dynamic using a case study of one sixth-grade student’s explanation of seasonal variation in the number of daylight hours. The goal is to help educators better recognize, assess, and promote these ideas in their everyday class interactions. ISE educators seeking to expand conversation as meaning-making will find this paper of interest.
The authors argue that to address the lack of student interest in STEM careers, educators need to better understand the career choice and the decision-making processes of students. To better understand student decision-making, the authors interviewed 13 high school students and identified four types of conversation (formative, performative, consequent, and potential) regarding science-related professions. These four ways of talking can inform educators about ways to share information about science careers.
In this article, the authors discuss the results of a study that examined how inquiry-based learning activities can be structured to support what the authors term collective knowledge building. This article could be of interest to ISE educators when designing, leading, or researching inquiry-based science learning activities.
This research reports on the results of two studies which found that mathematically talented students who had had greater exposure to accelerated, enriched, and individualized STEM learning opportunities achieved more significant STEM accomplishments later in life than their matched counterparts. Notable accomplishments were designated as achieving STEM careers, STEM PhDs, STEM tenure, STEM publications, and STEM patents. The researchers found this relationship to hold true even when controlling for high levels of motivation. Furthermore, the research found that experiences that were more
Socioscientific issues bridge science and society. As such, they are open to multiple viewpoints and inherently associated with morality. This paper presents the findings from a year-long study designed to enhance students’ moral sensitivity so that they are better able to recognise and negotiate the moral arguments embedded with socioscientific issues (SSIs).
In this seminal paper from 2001, the researcher posits sociocultural perspectives as a useful theoretical and methodological lens for examining science education. The paper examines the types of questions that are asked when applying a sociocultural lens to the science classroom and usefully references several different bodies of work within the sociocultural tradition. The research paper discusses the ways in which non-sociocultural perspectives have positioned science and the processes of learning science in ways that privilege dispassionate rationality in a way that may not be easily
The purpose of the study was to investigate how situational interest was triggered for high-school students on an aquarium field trip. Although actual learning was not itself measured in this study, the author investigates how the museum setting triggers interest, which in turn influences learning and is therefore important to cultivate. As the author admits, some of the findings are intuitive but the study empirically confirms some approaches, which can spark situational interest. Five areas that triggered situational interest were identified through student interviews: social involvement
The authors of this paper use Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as a conceptual framework for understanding how technology is tied to culturally specific human practices, and what this means in an educational context. ISE professionals can use this paper to better understand the relationship between technology and science education and how technology as a cultural tool can represent inherent (privileged) epistemologies. The researchers in this study examined Reef Net technology of the WSNE (Saanich) First Nation to demonstrate how cultural ways of knowing are embedded in the