Through this review of research on public engagement with science, Feinstein, Allen, and Jenkins advocate supporting students as “competent outsiders”—untrained in formal sciences, yet using science in ways relevant to their lives. Both formal and informal settings can be well suited for work in which students translate scientific content and practices into meaningful actions.
Students with strong religious views may adopt a variety of positions on the scientific concept of evolution. The attempts students make to address potential mismatches between their religious and scientific viewpoints influence their learning approaches. This Yasri and Mancy paper presents five ways in which young people reconcile evolution and religion,and discusses the implications for educators.
In this study, the authors describe a conceptual framework addressing culturally based ways of knowing, and provide a brief description of their efforts to design a community-based summer science program with a Native American tribe using this framework. To address the call to attract culturally diverse students to STEM fields, the authors advocate supporting students in their navigation of multiple and perhaps conflicting epistemologies, and using the student community as resources to be built upon, rather than pushing them toward replacing their personal epistemologies with canonical
In this article, Lyon, Jafri, and St. Louis discuss the limitations of the concept of the “STEM pipeline,” an analogy commonly used in education and policy discussions to describe the academic progression of students from elementary school through higher education in STEM, ideally resulting in employment in a science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) field. Based on a decade of experience with the urban out-of-school time (OST) program Project Exploration, the authors propose a conceptual framework that supports youth development goals in addition to STEM learning. The Youth-Science