Demographic Predictors of Students’ Science Participation over the Age of 16: an Australian Case Study

Research in Science Education - Using the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) data, this paper aimed to examine if, and to what extent, demographic factors predict students’...     

Learning,literacy and identity: ‘I don’t think I’m a failure any more’

The impact of participation in adult literacy programmes on learners’ identities is examined through an interrogation of their past and current experiences and the assessment of the effect of particular pedagogies. The findings show how learners’ positive experiences in their programmes had caused them to re-evaluate their previous understandings and enabled the construction of new identities as people that are able to learn. These changes had come about through the challenging of negative discourses, the creation of new figured worlds and imagined futures, and the use of a learning curriculum where learners’ experiences were utilized as positive resources.     

Mentoring Undergraduate Researchers: An Exploratory Study of Students’ and Professors’ Perceptions

Mentoring is believed to be one of the most influential factors in US efforts to encourage college‐aged students to seek careers in science, yet the role that mentoring plays in this process has not been elucidated. The researchers were interested in understanding whether the long‐held beliefs about the importance of mentoring would be revealed as what actually occurs in an undergraduate research program. They describe students’ perceptions of the mentoring process and students’ beliefs about how it impacted their experiences as undergraduate researchers and their development as scientists. Also described are professors’ perceptions of their roles and effectiveness as mentors in students’ development as scientists. A multi‐case narrative analysis was conducted of two groups, undergraduate science scholars (n=5) and mentoring professors (n=5), who were each interviewed on two occasions at the beginning and end of the first year of a funded research program. As this grounded research study shows, students and professors described student gains as increased technical expertise and communication skills. Professors suggested that they were available to students on a regular and frequent basis. However, students’ experiences suggested a contradiction. They were often mentored by postgraduates, technical assistants, and other students; their meetings with mentoring professors were infrequent and at times distant. With respect to mentoring, this finding highlights the differences between beliefs and the reality of what was delivered. Professors discussed the challenges associated with mentoring including the recruitment of and difficulty of working with students whose first language was not English and concerns about the quality of instruction from graduate students.     

Effects of a BCI-Based AR Inquiring Tool on Primary Students’ Science Learning: A Quasi-Experimental Field Study

Journal of Science Education and Technology - This study aims to explore the impact of an augmented reality (AR) scientific inquiry tool based on a brain-computer interface (BCI) on students’...     

The Impact of Teachers and Their Science Teaching on Students’ ‘Science Interest’: A four-year study

There is a crisis in school science in Australia and this may be related to insufficient students developing an interest in science. This extended study looked at changes in 14 students’ interest in science as they moved through junior secondary school into Year 10. Although the majority of these students still had an interest in science in Year 10, it had fluctuated for most students from year to year. The presence or absence of simple, but effective, teaching practices, identified by these students, seems to suggest one way to retain or improve situational and, it would appear, in several cases, personal interest.     

Developing ‘Butterfly Warriors’: a Case Study of Science for Citizenship

Given worldwide concern about a decline in student engagement in school science and an increasing call for science for citizenship in New Zealand Curriculum, this study focused on a butterfly unit that investigated how students in a year-4 primary classroom learnt about New Zealand butterflies through thinking, talking, and acting as citizen scientists. The butterfly unit included five lessons. The researchers observed the lessons and interviewed students and the classroom teacher. The students completed a unit evaluation survey after the unit. Findings indicate that the students enjoyed and were interested in activities such as reading about butterflies, learning and using new vocabulary, drawing butterfly life cycles, as well as hunting, tagging and releasing butterflies and publishing the data they had collected on a dedicated website. Through their participation in the unit, students had opportunities to act locally and globally, and to ‘see themselves’ in science through ‘being there’ experience. Units like this have the potential to develop students’ interest for longer-term engagement in science, even those students who may never envision themselves as professional scientists.     

Undergraduate Science Students’ Scientist–Practitioner Gap: the Role of Epistemic Curiosity and Cognitive Flexibility

International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education - The scientist–practitioner gap refers to the phenomenon of individuals with a scientific background exhibiting non-scientific...     

“Feeling like a Scientist”: Factors Affecting Students’ Selections of Technology Tools in the Science Classroom

Journal of Science Education and Technology - This research looked at the choices that children make in the classroom when offered manual and technological options to measure scientific variables....     

Uncovering Implicit Assumptions: a Large-Scale Study on Students’ Mental Models of Diffusion

Students’ mental models of diffusion in a gas phase solution were studied through the use of the Structure and Motion of Matter (SAMM) survey. This survey permits identification of categories of ways students think about the structure of the gaseous solute and solvent, the origin of motion of gas particles, and trajectories of solute particles in the gaseous medium. A large sample of data (N?=?423) from students across grade 8 (age 13) through upper-level undergraduate was subjected to a cluster analysis to determine the main mental models present. The cluster analysis resulted in a reduced data set (N?=?308), and then, mental models were ascertained from robust clusters. The mental models that emerged from analysis were triangulated through interview data and characterised according to underlying implicit assumptions that guide and constrain thinking about diffusion of a solute in a gaseous medium. Impacts of students’ level of preparation in science and relationships of mental models to science disciplines studied by students were examined. Implications are discussed for the value of this approach to identify typical mental models and the sets of implicit assumptions that constrain them.     

‘If there is a job description I don’t think I’ve read one’: a case study of programme leadership in a UK pre-1992 university

This paper reports on an exploratory study of the role of programme leaders (PLs) in a pre-1992 university, based on interviews with PLs (7) and a survey of taught Masters students (54) in a single school. The study elicits PLs’ activities, most of which might be categorised as managerial and administrative, with leadership required intermittently; the preeminent role involves managing programme quality. The study finds that institutional guidelines overlook important aspects of PLs’ work (such as organising enrichment activities and student advocacy) which affect the quality of provision, and the findings challenge the notion that PLs are engaged in a ‘disesteemed’ service.     

Factors Influencing Postsecondary STEM Students’ Views of the Public Communication of an Emergent Technology: a Cross-National Study from Five Universities

Recent efforts in the science education community have highlighted the need to integrate research and theory from science communication research into more general science education scholarship. These synthesized research perspectives are relatively novel but serve an important need to better understand the impacts that the advent of rapidly emerging technologies will have on a new generation of scientists and engineers including their formal communication with engaged citizenry. This cross-national study examined postsecondary science and engineering students’ (n?=?254 from five countries: Austria, Finland, France, Israel, and USA) perspectives on the role of science communication in their own formal science and engineering education. More broadly, we examined participants’ understanding of their perceived responsibilities of communicating science and engineering to the general public when an issue contains complex social and ethical implications (SEI). The study is contextualized in the emergent technology of nanotechnology for which SEI are of particular concern and for which the general public often perceives conflicting risks and benefits. Findings indicate that student participants’ hold similar views on the need for their own training in communication as future scientists and engineers. When asked about the role that ethics and risk perception plays in research, development, and public communication of nanotechnology, participants demonstrate similar trajectories of perspectives that are, however, often anchored in very different levels of beginning concern. Results are discussed in the context of considerations for science communication training within formal science education curricula globally.     

Language Use in a Multilingual Class: a Study of the Relation Between Bilingual Students’ Languages and Their Meaning-Making in Science

In this study, we examine how bilingual students in elementary school use their languages and what this means for their meaning-making in science. The class was multilingual with students bilingual in different minority languages and the teacher monolingual in Swedish. The analysis is based on a pragmatic approach and the theory of translanguaging. The science content was electricity, and the teaching involved class instruction and hands-on activities in small groups. The findings of the study are divided into two categories, students’ conversations with the teacher and student’s conversations with each other. Since the class was multilingual, the class instruction was carried out in Swedish. Generally, when the conversations were characterised by an initiation, response and evaluation pattern, the students made meaning of the activities without any language limitations. However, when the students, during whole class instruction, were engaged in conversations where they had to argue, discuss and explain their ideas, their language repertoire in Swedish limited their possibilities to express themselves. During hands-on activities, students with the same minority language worked together and used both of their languages as resources. In some situations, the activities proceeded without any visible language limitations. In other situations, students’ language repertoire limited their possibilities to make meaning of the activities despite being able to use both their languages. What the results mean for designing and conducting science lessons in a multilingual class is discussed.     

‘Learning Experience’ Provided by Science Teaching Practice in a Classroom and the Development of Students’ Competences

According to the literature, there is a very important corpus of knowledge that allows for the investigation of some dimensions of ‘learning experience’ provided to students, in relation to epistemic, pedagogical and meta-cognitive practices. However, in the literature, there is little investigation into the invariance (or not) of the characteristics of students’ learning experience while being taught a scientific subject by the same teacher. This paper suggests that the relationship between the learning experience provided and the competences developed is not properly highlighted. This paper analyses the learning experience provided to students in epistemic, pedagogical and meta-cognitive terms. The students were taught the proprieties and applications of light by one teacher, in three classes, over 7 weeks. We analysed the data in each referred learning experience, using a pre-defined category system. The students’ competences were evaluated by a competence test. The epistemic demand of each item and the students’ performances were also analysed. Our findings point to the non invariance of learning experiences provided to students and the influence of some dimensions of learning experiences provided in the development of certain competences. These findings and their implications are contextualized and discussed.     

The Relationship Between Students’ Casual Interest in Science and Their Perceptions of the Undergraduate Laboratory Environment

Research in Science Education - Science instructors assume that they have created their laboratory curriculum in such a way as to reflect an ideal science instructional laboratory, but students may...     

Investigating Students’ Conceptions of Technology-Assisted Science Learning: a Drawing Analysis

This study investigated high school students’ conceptions of technology-assisted science learning via drawing analysis, and explored how students with different degrees of computer experience and science learning self-efficacy may show different conceptions via their drawings. The participants included 335 senior high school students in Taiwan (179 male and 156 female). All of them were asked by guiding questions to make two drawings to represent their conceptions of technology-assisted science learning in actual and ideal contexts, respectively. Their background information including computer experience and science learning self-efficacy were obtained using self-reported questionnaires. Through drawing analysis, seven categories of conceptions of technology-assisted science learning were identified, including types of technology, location of learning, types of learning activities, content of learning, participants of learning activities, affordance of learning technology, and effects of learning technology. The results further revealed that the students’ conceptions of actual and ideal technology-assisted science learning significantly differed in some sub-categories of all categories except the category of participants of learning activities. Moreover, students’ computer experience and science learning self-efficacy may link to different conceptions of technology-assisted science learning. Future research and directions are also discussed.

     

‘If the students don’t come,or if they don’t finish,we don’t get the money.’ Principals,immigration, and the organisational logic of school choice in Sweden

ABSTRACT

School choice is associated with increased educational inequality and across-school segregation. This article documents the organisational practices and logics affecting school segregation and inequality. Through an institutional ethnographic study of principals’ responses to school choice within the context of immigration in Malmö, Sweden, I find that principals work to align their schools with generalised conceptions of a ‘good’ school – a ‘Swedish’ school without many immigrants. Principals pursue the image or reality of ‘Swedishness’ through choices about the presentation of the school, approaches to managing enrolment, selection of programmes of study, and even decisions about where schools are located. Through their administrative work, principals write presumed preferences for Swedishness into the structure of the school system. The results suggest that, when addressing the link between school choice and equality, group preferences of school choosers cannot be considered independently of the organisation of schooling accomplished by principals and other organisational actors.