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.
Dahlstrom and Ho offer advice on using narrative to communicate about science. They conclude that the rhetorical purpose of the narrative should be thoroughly examined so as not to unfairly influence a reader or listener.
At first glance, public knowledge of climate science appears encouraging. When prompted, most people can correctly identify some of the contributors to climate change. But they are much less likely to do so when they are not shown a checklist of possible causes. This study examined public understanding of two commonly used terms: “global warming” and “climate change.” The findings have important implications for informal science educators seeking to develop effective programmes and exhibitions on climate science.
Would religious Americans impose a ten-year moratorium on scientific research? Of 62 interviewees, 60 responded negatively. Interestingly, respondents employed reasoning skills alongside their religious beliefs, complicating the common belief that scientific and religious values cannot co-exist in the same person.
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, researchers investigated levels of awareness of and responsibility for global climate change in two groups of children. The researchers argue that understanding the nature of beliefs, and how they may be modified by particular influences, is important if educators are to challenge the status quo, in which “the majority of individuals do not believe that they are responsible for or can engage in any actions which will be environmentally efficacious” (Uzzell, 2000, p. 314).
In this review paper, Oliver calls for greater cross-pollination between neuroscience research and educational practice. She asks, “What can educators learn from an understanding of educational neuroscience?”
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
In this article, researchers report on the ways that middle school students positioned themselves as agents of change in their community by using the results of their research into local scientific phenomena and advocating for environmental reforms. This article might be of interest to ISE educators who are exploring how their programs can support the emergence of positive science learning identities in their youth participants.
To improve science education for culturally and linguistically diverse students, schools and communities can create “mutual benefit partnerships” to identify and address local problems. Through the example of the Chicago River Project, Bouillion and Gomez illustrate how such partnerships can connect formal learning contexts with the rich ways communities experience science outside of school.