In response to the growing emphasis on addressing global socio-scientific issues like climate change and viral pandemics in K-12 education, we designed three socio-scientific units for middle school science. We call this curriculum Grand Challenges (GC). The GC curriculum shifts from traditional methods to a focus on socio-scientific issues that resonate locally and globally and prepare students for

Identifying the mental models held by students has been widely emphasized as being a pivotal aspect of effective science education. In fact, it allows us to understand students’ conceptions, detect teaching-learning difficulties and tailor instruction accordingly. Hence, in this study, the plant nutrition mental models held by upper secondary students were investigated and empirically validated with

The Australian science curriculum is intended to enable school students to develop an understanding and curiosity about the way that science can assist them in making sense of the physical and technological world. In addition to understanding and communicating scientific knowledge and using inquiry processes, students also need to develop the skills to make evidence-based decisions about socio-ecological

Guiding students’ STEM problem solving entails dynamic processes driven by changes in real-world contexts. To understand these processes, we aimed to identify the formation and influence of ‘norms’ as shared behaviour patterns desirable in STEM problem-solving. To this end, 10 sessions of STEM lessons for secondary students were carried out, and we collected data comprising lesson observation videos

The use of multiple-choice (MC) instruments to assess pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) has advantages in terms of test economy and objectivity, but it also poses challenges, for example, in terms of adequately capturing the intended construct. To help address these challenges, we developed and evaluated a new instrument to assess science teachers’ PCK of scientific reasoning in biology contexts

Photosynthesis is a crucial topic in life sciences and is intimately connected to human life. In this study, photosynthesis served as the context to examine the effects of 6E-based STEM learning strategies on tenth-grade students’ academic achievement, higher-order thinking skills, and attitudes towards STEM. Throughout the intervention of six biological lessons, a pretest-posttest non-equivalent group

Science education literature states that fostering students’ and teachers’ knowledge of NOS has shifted from being a desirable goal to an essential one. This article focuses on the development of NOS conceptions among MA Education students. To develop those conceptions, the researcher designed various learning activities in the context of ‘research of history on DNA’. Seven students were observed and

This meta-analysis examined whether learning outcomes differ (a) for STEM integration versus traditional instruction and (b) across STEM integration implementations. Based on 79 effect sizes from 40 studies of 15,577 students, those learning via STEM integration outperformed other students on academic achievement tests (g = 0.661; 95% CI [0.548, 0.774]). The effect sizes of STEM integration on achievement

A growing body of empirical studies in the field of early childhood science education suggests play as a dynamic means to engage young children with the natural world and create the conditions for children’s learning and development in science. Although our understanding of play in science as an activity deepens, we still do not know much about the dynamics of scientific toys in science teaching and

The prevalence of diseases stemming from poor nutrition emphasizes the importance of educating people about healthy eating habits. One approach to achieving this is through educational escape games, which embody the features of a situated learning environment. Utilized the situated learning theory as a theoretical and methodological framework, the goal of our study was to examine the role of science-based

Literature has emphasised the need for SSI education to systematically address the risks produced by modern society. This study examines the quality of risk-focused, socio-scientific arguments generated by 22 elementary students in South Korea, concerning nuclear power. Participants read two articles with opposing views on the nuclear phase-out policy and constructed written arguments to justify their

Ongoing shortages of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers have prompted policy aimed at recruiting career change teachers as a solution. However, little is known about what deters career changers from becoming STEM teachers. This gap is explored through interviews with nine career changers who contemplated, but decided against a career change to STEM teaching. Inductive

Science education bears the broader objective of nurturing students today to be scientifically-literate citizens of tomorrow who are able to foresee challenges, invent solutions and make responsible decisions for global issues. As a prelude to the new focus of agency in the Anthropocene, this paper presents an intervention on climate change with upper secondary students in a museum of natural history

Mechanistic explanations, aiming to disclose details of entities and their activities, employ the act of unpacking which, inherently and paradoxically, produces explanatory gaps—pieces of undisclosed, undetailed mechanistic information. These gaps, termed explanatory black boxes, are often perceived as counterproductive to the teaching of mechanisms, yet are integral to it, and their cognizant use

Science museums (SMs) are important places for informal science learning, with visitors’ self-directed social interactions affecting their learning outcomes. Analyzing group conversations with varying compositions in SMs can reveal visitor interactions characteristics, knowledge construction process, and emotional experiences during their visits. This is significant for exploring how group interactions

Despite cultural differences, the Philippines–Japan partnership is developing an intentional teaching curriculum with parallel standards. However, disparities among their respective educational systems have prompted inequalities. As education plays a critical role in collaboration, we explored the Epistemic Goals (EGs) and Epistemic Practices (EPs) in the biology curriculum, with the research question:

Science centres are informal learning spaces embedded with artefacts embodying mediational affordances. This exploratory and small-scale mixed methods study juxtaposes eye-tracking technologies and qualitative interviews to examine how visitors to a gallery navigated this space and interacted with different artefacts. A total of 15 visitors to the science centre gallery, Energy Story, participated