This article reports on a study that reveals some of the complexities of supporting children's understandings of scientific argumentation. The paper could be useful for ISE educators seeking to incorporate scientific argumentation processes and skills into their programs for middle-school-aged children. Specifically, the article notes the benefits of context-specific (rather than generic) prompts and questions, and the need for ongoing professional development to support teachers in encouraging scientific argumentation.
This paper reports on changes in teacher attitudes toward visually impaired students following a yearlong programme that provided funds for adaptive resources, supplies, and equipment. The context framing this study is that special education teachers often lack knowledge of science and mathematics content. Conversely, many science and mathematics teachers lack confidence and competence in engaging young people with disabilities. Perhaps as a consequence of these factors, people with disabilities are notably absent in STEM fields (Bonetta, 2007). This study centres on teaching visually impaired
Researchers found that students developed greater levels of what they call scientific abilities when provided opportunities to design, refine, and reflect on science experiments during a laboratory course, as compared with students who conducted more traditional labs involving following directions in already established experimental designs. This article will interest informal educators seeking to provide students with opportunities to create, make, invent, and lead their own scientific investigations.
This paper describes a study designed to investigate whether fiction can help students to develop their opinions on socio-scientific issues. The findings suggest that fictional accounts can be effective, but the study did not investigate the quality of the reasoning underlying the opinions, nor their longevity.
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
Many ISE educators design opportunities for children to collaborate in learning activities. This study's findings show that, when collaborations are designed to let children take responsibility for each other's understanding, the development of positive dispositions toward mathematics increases.
This paper presents a quantitative strategy (K-means cluster analysis) for exploring museum-motivated ideas that can be helpful in resource allocation, marketing, event planning, and designing exhibits. Cluster analysis provides a potentially useful way of knowing and understanding visitors, especially when the rating statements used in the questionnaire and in the analysis represent the museum's intentions.
This study presents a disappointing account of Spanish secondary school students’ knowledge and understanding of the causes and consequences of climate change. Many of the key factors responsible for climate change are not recognized, whilst significant socioeconomic consequences of climate change, for example, increasing migration and food shortages, are rarely acknowledged.
Transitioning from textbook-style problems to ""real-world"" physics problem-solving requires participants to set limiting assumptions. In textbook-style questions these assumptions aren't necessary because all the numerical values are provided by the textbook. However, in real-world challenges this is often not the case. The article has implications for educators who are thinking about how to use real-world problems in their work.
This paper examines students' perspectives on a science enrichment programme led by a university-based science outreach initiative. Few studies have previously examined the impact of such experiences from the student perspective. Findings suggest carefully designed out-of-school inquiry programmes broaden students' experiences of science, particularly for those from under-resourced schools. The paper includes a checklist of conditions for success for out-of-school inquiry programmes which may be of interest to ISE educators.
This study outlines the learning goals, expectations, and perceived outcomes of a zoo field trip from the perspective of students, classroom teachers, and informal educators. They find, among other things, that that students most highly valued the social aspects of the field trip – opportunities to be with their friends and to discuss the field trip events with their friends. They also find that informal educators did not quite understand the needs or interests of the students and therefore missed opportunities to engage students with the science in the zoo. The authors close with several
The authors of this paper address the question of what it looks like when scientific ideas are collectively shared and developed in a classroom and how student discourse actions contribute to that dynamic using a case study of one sixth-grade student’s explanation of seasonal variation in the number of daylight hours. The goal is to help educators better recognize, assess, and promote these ideas in their everyday class interactions. ISE educators seeking to expand conversation as meaning-making will find this paper of interest.