There is an ever-growing body of science education research considering factors associated with teaching and learning in urban, suburban, and rural learning environments. However, there also appears to be a tendency to employ these contexts in euphemistic descriptions, when comparing of subsets of our society here in the USA. With this in mind, we attempted to determine the ways the terms urban, suburban, and rural, are used, defined, and characterized in science education research. This process included two developmental phases, which resulted in the development of our multi-dimensional analytical framework; a trial phase to test the framework; and finally an analytical phase in which we used this framework to examine a decade of science education research. The framework was constructed using emergent themes identified in education and government publications during the first two phases. It proved useful to assess whether urban, suburban, and rural were being explicitly, implicitly, or undefined in science education research. Results suggest scant evidence of the explicit defining/characterization of “urban,” “suburban,” and “rural.” This supported our suspicion that they are frequently being employed in the implication of subsets of our population, or as non-descript adjectives. Selected articles (n = 122) yielded (n = 28) explicit, (n = 60) implicit, and (n = 34) non-definitions of the terms. Such practices may have consequences with respect to educational policy and social justice concerns in science education. This is of particular interest with respect to the normalization of certain settings, cultures, behaviors, and students in science education.

考虑与城市、郊区和农村学习环境中的教与学相关的因素的科学教育研究越来越多。然而，在比较美国社会的子集时，似乎也倾向于在委婉的描述中使用这些上下文。考虑到这一点，我们试图确定城市、郊区和农村这些术语在科学教育研究中的使用、定义和表征方式。这个过程包括两个发展阶段，这导致了我们多维分析框架的发展；测试框架的试验阶段；最后是分析阶段我们在其中使用这个框架来检查十年的科学教育研究。该框架是使用前两个阶段在教育和政府出版物中确定的新兴主题构建的。事实证明，评估城市、郊区和农村在科学教育研究中是明确、隐含还是未定义是有用的。结果表明，很少有证据表明“城市”、“郊区”和“农村”的明确定义/特征。这支持了我们的怀疑，即它们经常被用于暗示我们人口的子集，或作为非描述性的形容词。所选文章 ( n  = 122) 产生 ( n  = 28) 显式、 ( n  = 60) 隐式和 ( n = 34) 术语的非定义。这种做法可能会对科学教育中的教育政策和社会正义问题产生影响。这对于科学教育中某些环境、文化、行为和学生的规范化特别有趣。