Science & Education最新文献

College science exams are an important and widespread marker for student progress toward technical careers. Predominantly enacted using traditional teaching practices, exams also represent an opportunity for significant improvement in higher education. To explore the potential benefits of a particular style of exam assessment known as exam preview methods, a mixed-methods experimental design was enacted in science classrooms across fields and with five faculty instructors at community colleges in the United States. Parallel sections were randomly assigned to be assessed with exams either in the faculty's traditional method or with exam preview methods, and data (primarily coded interviews and learning gains) were analyzed for the impacts of implementation. Students in sections using exam preview methods were observed to have better student experiences, more demonstrated learning, and better conditions for effective learning in the class as a whole. The results together suggest important benefits for students in exam preview sections when triangulated between different types of data. When weighed against a modest observed time cost for implementation of the new method, these data suggest that exam preview methods may be a straightforward and useful innovation for a range of science classrooms.

Guided by QuantCrit, we introduce and validate the Transformational STEM Consciousness (TSC) scale, which fuses students' motivation to pursue racial and social justice through STEM with a critique of STEM's historic complicity in inequity. Surveying 255 undergraduate and graduate students in 18 justice-integrated STEM courses across 11 US institutions, confirmatory factor analysis supported a unidimensional structure. Results also showed evidence of convergent (with equity-ethic career values, color-evasive racial attitudes, and STEM-justice learning behavior) and discriminant validity (weak ties to prestige motives, ethnic identity, and STEM identity). Using hierarchical blocked regression confirmed that color-evasive racial attitudes and prestige negatively predicted TSC, whereas equity-ethic, STEM identity, and prior STEM-justice exposure positively predicted it. TSC offers scholars and practitioners a concise, psychometrically sound tool for transforming the definition of STEM success.

This study examines how integrating sustainability through socio-scientific issue (SSI) in secondary chemistry teaching shapes epistemic openness and closure from a decolonial perspective, as mediated through classroom discourse. Drawing on a co-planned lesson on copper mining in Chile – a scientifically rich yet ethically and politically charged context – I analyse how pedagogical decisions positioned chemistry either as an apolitical framing (Gandolfi 2025b) or as a practice entangled with extractivism, environmental injustice, and responsibility. Using reflexive thematic analysis of lesson audio recordings, student artefacts, and researcher fieldnotes, and interpreting classroom interaction through Mortimer and Scott's (2003) communicative approaches and Gandolfi's (2025a) decolonial framework, I identify three key pedagogical moments across the lesson. Findings show that dialogic discourse initially opened space for students' ethical concerns but remained limited without follow-up that foregrounded structural causes of harm. A subsequent authoritative focus consolidated disciplinary understanding while producing epistemic closure. Epistemic openness was later re-activated when chemical evidence was reconnected to sustainability and enacted materially through waste-management deliberations. Findings suggest that decolonial perspectives in chemistry education can move teaching beyond content delivery toward pedagogies that centre justice, epistemic plurality, and critical engagement with real-world challenges, while remaining contingent on communicative shifts and deliberate pedagogical mediation.

Educating youth about environmental and climate justice is crucial in realizing a sustainable and flourishing future. Yet this can be challenging given the intense eco-emotions youth experience and express while learning about these consequential realities and their implications. However, strong emotions are not to be ignored, feared, or controlled, as they play a powerful role in science learning. To explore how emotions support deep sensemaking, I centered Latina Eco-feminist and Anti-colonial perspectives and the concept of “Sentipensar” [feel-thinking], examining the eco-emotional responses of a single youth participant, Idra. By using Sentipensar as an analytical tool, I was able to recognize how Idra made sense of the environmental injustices she encountered while participating in a science education program studying marine plastic pollution in Baja California, Mexico. Her story revealed that she practiced Sentipensar as a critical pedagogy to (1) foster honest and communal sensemaking, (2) clarify and deepen existing understandings, (3) defend herself and her future, and (4) cultivate science identities and just worldbuilding. The findings advocate for a departure from dominant logics that divorce reason from emotion and suggest that nurturing Sentipensar can cultivate the relational and axio-epistemological shifts needed in science teaching and learning.

To participate effectively in modern society, it is essential to have both knowledge of scientific concepts and an understanding of scientific practices. Children develop initial knowledge and skills to engage in scientific practices, such as identifying patterns, long before entering school. It can be assumed that instructional support of scientific practices fosters children's understanding of these practices. However, little is known about how scientific practices are implemented and supported in early childhood education and care. Therefore, this study explores which scientific practices preschool teachers initiate in early science activities, and how they support children's understanding of these practices. Further, we analyze whether these practices are combined within a Scientific Inquiry Cycle. To this end, 116 videos of science activities in which German preschool teachers interact with two to eight children (M = 4.57 years, SD = 0.64) were analyzed using a developed coding manual. The analysis revealed that, in most of the recorded science activities, children had multiple opportunities to engage in scientific practices (e.g., observing, predicting). These practices were frequently integrated into a simple inquiry cycle, typically consisting of prediction, testing, and interpretation. Investigations that lacked an underlying question, prediction, or interpretation, were rare. However, as preschool teachers did not provide instructional support that encouraged reflection on the meaning and purpose of scientific practices, this finding points to an opportunity to further promote children's understanding of these practices as they are a fundamental component of scientific literacy. Emphasizing procedural and epistemic knowledge in professional development can help preschool teachers more effectively support such inquiry processes in everyday activities. Building on teachers' implementation of scientific practices, the coding manual from this study offers concrete examples to foster children's engagement in and understanding of these practices.

Science identity (SI) has gained increasing prominence in science education research due to its potential role in fostering student engagement, motivation, and persistence in STEM pathways. However, its conceptualization remains varied and contested, complicating both measurement and curricular implementation. The PISA 2025 Science Framework incorporates SI as a new dimension of scientific literacy; yet, its multidimensional conceptualization conflates intrinsic SI traits with related constructs—such as science capital, attitudes toward science, self-efficacy, and environmental awareness—raising concerns about conceptual clarity and practical utility, particularly regarding attitudes toward science, which in previous PISA frameworks had served as an overarching construct encompassing these dimensions. This shift appears to represent a reorganization and relabeling of existing constructs rather than a genuine conceptual innovation, creating an “illusion of novelty” without substantive change. This position paper presents a study based on a critical literature review and a hermeneutic documentary analysis of the PISA 2025 Science Framework, aimed at examining how the SI construct is incorporated into this framework and to identify potential tensions with the relevant literature. Finally, we discuss the implications for assessment and curricular practice and invite further scholarly debate on refining and operationalizing SI across diverse educational contexts.

This study explores students' emotions in the undergraduate chemistry laboratory, focusing particularly on emotional responses to making mistakes. Using an ecological momentary assessment design, we collected on-task data from 240 students and 1635 learning situations during the laboratory sessions. A multilevel structural equation modeling framework, including a model with random slopes, was used to examine how situational factors (i.e., type of mistake and support in solving the mistake) and individual factor (i.e., gender, performance level, and subjective task values) affected students' emotional responses. Our findings suggest that mistakes typically trigger negative activating emotions in students. Individual factors also influenced emotional responses—well-performing students were less prone to elevated anxiety and frustration, remaining more relaxed in mistake situations, whereas students with high perceived emotional costs of laboratory activities experienced a more intense increase in anxiety in mistake situations. The type of mistake played an important role: careless mistakes were associated with more positive emotions, whereas students experienced increased anxiety and frustration and decreased positive emotions when the mistake stemmed from skill or knowledge gaps. The form of support also mattered: teacher support was linked to intensified anxiety and frustration in students, while peer support showed no statistically significant impacts on emotional levels. To foster meaningful learning, targeted support in emotional regulation should be provided for lower-performing students and those with high perceived emotional costs in mistake situations, particularly when mistakes stem from a lack of skill or knowledge.

Science identity is often conceptualized through constructs such as performance, competence, recognition, and interest, with prior research highlighting the roles of race, gender, and cultural background in shaping students' experiences. However, limited scholarship has examined how disability interacts with science identity in postsecondary science education. This qualitative study explores the relationships between scientific and disabled identities among 21 undergraduate students who self-identify as disabled and have participated in lab-based science courses at a public R1 university. Through semi-structured interviews analyzed using thematic and deductive coding, we examined how students narrate the intersection of these two identities and how dimensions of the prevailing science identity framework manifest across those narratives. Nearly all participants described their identities as oppositional in at least some contexts, with performance and recognition by others, rather than competence, emerging as the dimensions most disrupted by disabling environments. Many also described interactive and parallel relationships, in which disability and science identity shaped one another bidirectionally, and in which skills cultivated through disability—resilience, adaptability, and systems thinking—transferred meaningfully into scientific practice. Fewer participants described overlapping or intersectional relationships, the latter representing the most integrated view of the two identities as mutually constitutive. Across relationship types, structural conditions consistently shaped participants' experiences including the near-total absence of visible disabled community in science spaces, and the burden of navigating disclosure. These findings extend science identity frameworks to account for disability as a key social dimension, with implications for mentorship, institutional support, and inclusive science education.

This theoretical paper examines why we make claims like “cooking is chemistry,” what these claims mean, and what good or harm they accomplish. We make three interrelated arguments: First, the relationship between scientific and everyday practices is more complicated and less obvious than is often claimed; second, educators and scientists link scientific and everyday practices for reasons that have little do with the accuracy of those links; and third, pushing everyday practices under the umbrella of science can actually do harm–not least because it ignores the independent history and value of those practices. We conclude by discussing how more useful connections—and distinctions—between scientific and everyday practice could enrich both science education and public discourse.