Articles

A close look at change: the role of an instructional-team community on an Instructor’s evolution during instructional reform

In transforming undergraduate STEM education, it is important to understand the personal and contextual factors that impact instructors’ reform efforts. In this study we explored an instructor’s drivers and mo...

Authors: Katelyn M. Southard, Susan D. Hester, Jazmin Jurkiewicz, Joan E. Curry, Young Ae Kim, Jonathan Cox, Lisa K. Elfring, Paul Blowers and Vicente Talanquer

Promoting computational thinking through project-based learning

This paper introduces project-based learning (PBL) features for developing technological, curricular, and pedagogical supports to engage students in computational thinking (CT) through modeling. CT is recogniz...

Authors: Namsoo Shin, Jonathan Bowers, Joseph Krajcik and Daniel Damelin

Graduate- and undergraduate-student perceptions of and preferences for teaching practices in STEM classrooms

Despite positive evidence for active learning (AL), lecturing dominates science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) higher education. Though instructors acknowledge AL to be valuable, many resist ...

Authors: Ngawang Gonsar, Lorelei Patrick and Sehoya Cotner

Emotional experiences of secondary pre-service teachers conducting practical work in a science lab course: individual differences and prediction of teacher efficacy

The present study explored pre-service science teachers’ emotions during a semester-long laboratory science course. Emotions were measured with the experience sampling technique, which is a research method tha...

Authors: Robbert Smit, Nicolas Robin and Florian Rietz

Participating in the scientific publication process: exploring how pre-college students perceive publication within the scientific enterprise

Scientists spend a substantial amount of their time engaging with the primary literature: reading, constructing, reviewing and revising it. Yet, the role of primary literature is generally absent from the deve...

Authors: Sarah C. Fankhauser, Gwendolynne Reid, Gwendolyn Mirzoyan, Clara Meaders and Olivia Ho-Shing

Measuring the long-term effects of informal science education experiences: challenges and potential solutions

Despite the fact that most science learning takes place outside of school, little is known about how engagement in informal science learning (ISL) experiences affects learners’ knowledge, skill development, in...

Authors: Nancy L. Staus, John H. Falk, Aaron Price, Robert H. Tai and Lynn D. Dierking

Exploring a pathway towards energy conservation through emphasizing the connections between energy, systems, and fields

Energy conservation is a fundamental concept in physics and across the sciences as it provides a lens for investigating a wide range of phenomena. Research into energy learning progressions has shown that a ma...

Authors: Marcus Kubsch, Sebastian Opitz, Jeffrey Nordine, Knut Neumann, David Fortus and Joseph Krajcik

Changes to students’ motivation to learn science

Studies that investigated the relations between the environment and students’ motivation to engage with science have typically looked at the state of students’ motivation at a given time and its relations with th...

Authors: David Fortus and Israel Touitou

A content analysis of pre-college lesson plans on human evolution

One of the most fundamental understandings within biology is evolution, yet often ascribed as one of the most misunderstood scientific concepts by the American public. Despite not being explicitly mentioned in...

Authors: Rebecca L. Hite

‘Even though it might take me a while, in the end, I understand it’: a longitudinal case study of interactions between a conceptual change strategy and student motivation, interest and confidence

Although there have been many investigations of the social, motivational, and emotional aspects of conceptual change, there have been few studies investigating the intersection of these factors with cognitive ...

Authors: Felicity McLure, Mihye Won and David F. Treagust

Incorporating socioscientific issues into a STEM education course: exploring teacher use of argumentation in SSI and plans for classroom implementation

The Socioscientific Issue (SSI) framework was applied to explore how a team of two teachers navigated SSI cases as students in a STEM education graduate program. Using a case study approach, we found a connect...

Authors: Joseph Johnson, Augusto Z. Macalalag Jr and Julie Dunphy

Health education, obesity and the making of citizens

This article discusses the socioscientific issue of obesity in relation to citizenship and democratic politics. It is structured in three parts: a) a theoretical part that elaborates on health as an individual...

Authors: Claes Malmberg, Anders Urbas and Tomas Nilson

Graduate teaching assistants: sharing epistemic agency with non-science majors in the biology laboratory

In teaching laboratories, scientific reasoning and argumentation are often taught in concert so students are provided opportunities to formulate a more nuanced understanding of science-as-practice and science ...

Authors: Justin Robert McFadden and Linda Fuselier

When goals do not concur: conflicting perceptions of school science

In this case study we investigated how differences in the achievement goal orientations of a high school biology teacher and her 9th grade (14 years old) student led to tensions between them in their perspecti...

Authors: David Fortus and Limor Daphna

Fostering students’ socioscientific decision-making: exploring the effectiveness of an environmental science competition

To make informed decisions has been acknowledged as an essential ability to negotiate socioscientific issues. However, many young people show an inadequate understanding of how to make well-informed decisions,...

Authors: Carola Garrecht, Marc Eckhardt, Tim Niclas Höffler and Ute Harms

Missed expectations: teacher and coach tensions at the boundary of STEM integration in an elementary classroom

The current study explored how a STEM coach supported an elementary teacher during the implementation of an integrated curriculum that culminated with an engineering design challenge. The findings of the case ...

Authors: Justin McFadden and Gillian Roehrig

Peer-led team learning for introductory biology: relationships between peer-leader relatability, perceived role model status, and the potential influences of these variables on student learning gains

Student-instructor interactions have an influence on student achievement and perceptions of learning. In college and university settings, large introductory STEM courses are increasingly including Peer-Led Tea...

Authors: Christina I. Winterton, Ryan D. P. Dunk and Jason R. Wiles

Expanding our views of science education to address sustainable development, empowerment, and social transformation

On 25 September 2015, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution, which took effect 1 January 2016, to transform the world to better meet human needs and the requirements of economic transformation, while pr...

Authors: William C. Kyle Jr.

Students’ problem-solving strategies in qualitative physics questions in a simulation-based formative assessment

Previous studies on quantitative physics problem solving have been concerned with students’ using equations simply as a numerical computational tool. The current study started from a research question: “How do...

Authors: Mihwa Park

Interdisciplinary insights from instructor interviews reconciling “structure and function” in biology, biochemistry, and chemistry through the context of enzyme binding

Structure and function is an essential crosscutting concept in undergraduate STEM education and appears in numerous disciplines and contexts from the introductory to advanced levels. This concept is exemplifie...

Authors: Rachel Yoho, Tanner Foster, Mark Urban-Lurain, John Merrill and Kevin C. Haudek

Understanding interactions in face-to-face and remote undergraduate science laboratories: a literature review

This paper reviews the ways in which interactions have been studied, and the findings of such studies, in science education in both face-to-face and remote laboratories. Guided by a systematic selection proces...

Authors: Jianye Wei, David F. Treagust, Mauro Mocerino, Anthony D. Lucey, Marjan G. Zadnik and Euan D. Lindsay

Biology education research: building integrative frameworks for teaching and learning about living systems

This critical review examines the challenges and opportunities facing the field of Biology Education Research (BER). Ongoing disciplinary fragmentation is identified as a force working in opposition to the dev...

Authors: Ross H. Nehm

Integrating engineering in K-12 science education: spelling out the pedagogical, epistemological, and methodological arguments

This position paper is motivated by recent educational reform efforts that urge the integration of engineering in science education. We argue that it is plausible and beneficial to integrate engineering into f...

Authors: Senay Purzer and Jenny Patricia Quintana-Cifuentes

Modeling competence in science education

Research on the understanding of the nature of models and modeling processes in science education have received a lot of attention in science education. In this article, we make five claims about the research ...

Authors: Mei-Hung Chiu and Jing-Wen Lin

New directions in socioscientific issues research

The socioscientific issues framework has proven to have a significant impact over the last two decades on many areas related to the development of functional scientific literacy in students. In this article, w...

Authors: Dana L. Zeidler, Benjamin C. Herman and Troy D. Sadler

Reimagining public science education: the role of lifelong free-choice learning

Profound changes are occurring in society, disrupting current systems and institutions; these disruptions also are affecting science education practice and research. Science learning is becoming a lifelong, se...

Authors: John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking

Science|Environment|Health – the emergence of a new pedagogy of complex living systems

Science|Environment|Health (S|E|H) is an emerging science pedagogy for complex living systems. The name highlights a situation of mutual benefit between science education, environmental education and health ed...

Authors: Albert Zeyer and Justin Dillon

Argumentation and interdisciplinarity: reflections from the Oxford Argumentation in Religion and Science Project

Argumentation has emerged as a key area of research and development in science education in recent years. Simply defined, argumentation is about the justification of knowledge claims with evidence and reasons....

Authors: Sibel Erduran, Liam Guilfoyle, Wonyong Park, Jessica Chan and Nigel Fancourt

Promoting deep learning through project-based learning: a design problem

In this paper, we present a design solution that involves the bringing together of Project-based Learning (PBL) with the theory of usable knowledge (Pellegrino & Hilton, Developing transferable knowledge and s...

Authors: Emily C. Miller and Joseph S. Krajcik

Teaching and learning nature of scientific knowledge: Is it Déjà vu all over again?

This review traces the history of research on the teaching and learning of nature of scientific knowledge (NOSK), and its implications for curriculum and instruction. Initially, the complex rubric of NOSK is c...

Authors: Norman G. Lederman and Judith S. Lederman

Progressing chemistry education research as a disciplinary field

This article offers a viewpoint regarding the current status of chemistry education research (CER) as a scholarly field within science education, and suggests priorities for future directions of work in the fi...

Authors: Keith S. Taber

Learning progressions: framing and designing coherent sequences for STEM education

The coupled influences of scholarship in the fields of Psychology, Philosophy, and Pedagogy beginning in the 1950s, set in motion the emergence of new images, methodological perspectives, theories, and design ...

Authors: Richard A. Duschl

The future challenge of Earth science education research

This article addresses the question of what the future directions and emphases of the research in the earth science education field ought to be. During the past 30 years, Earth science education research has e...

Authors: Nir Orion

Physics education research for 21^st century learning

Education goals have evolved to emphasize student acquisition of the knowledge and attributes necessary to successfully contribute to the workforce and global economy of the twenty-first Century. The new educa...

Authors: Lei Bao and Kathleen Koenig

Editorial: Disciplinary and interdisciplinary science education research (DISER)

Authors: Xiufeng Liu and Lei Wang