Science Teachers’ Use of Mass Media to Address Socio-Scientific and Sustainability Issues

The currency, relevancy and changing nature of science makes it a natural topic of focus for mass media outlets. Science teachers and students can capitalize on this wealth of scientific information to explore socio-scientific and sustainability issues; however, without a lens on how those media are created and how representations of science are constructed through media, the use of mass media in the science classroom may be risky. Limited research has explored how science teachers naturally use mass media to explore scientific issues in the classroom or how mass media is used to address potential overlaps between socio-scientific-issue based instruction and education for sustainability. This naturalistic study investigated the reported and actual classroom uses of mass media by secondary science teachers’ to explore socio-scientific and sustainability issues as well as the extent to which their instructional approaches did or did not overlap with frameworks for SSI-based instruction, education for sustainability, and media literacy education. The results of this study suggest that secondary science teachers use mass media to explore socio-scientific and sustainability issues, but their use of frameworks aligned with SSI-based, education for sustainability, and media literacy education was limited. This paper provides suggestions for how we, as science educators and researchers, can advance a teaching and learning agenda for encouraging instruction that more fully utilizes the potential of mass media to explore socio-scientific issues in line with perspectives from education for sustainability.     

Autobiography in science education: Greater objectivity through local knowledge

In our paper we argue that (1) autobiography ought to be considered both the telling of one's story and the using of that story with others to understand and use difference productively, and (2) autobiography (as telling and interacting) dismantles the universalistic tug of science and replaces it with a push for science as local knowledge. To accomplish this dual task, we share selective autobiographical accounts of lives (autobiography as telling), and then use these accounts to have a conversation about urban science education (autobiography as interacting). Following these autobiographical accounts we then discuss how our different stories apart and together provide a greater objective insight into what it means to come-to-know science. When talking about their lives, people lie sometimes, forget a lot, exaggerate, become confused, and get things wrong. Yet, they are revealing truths. These truths don't reveal the past “as it actually was,” aspiring to a standard of objectivity. They give us instead the truths of our experiences. (Personal Narratives Group (PNG), 1989, p. 261)     

Inquiry Learning in the Singaporean Context: Factors affecting student interest in school science

Recent research reveals that students' interest in school science begins to decline at an early age. As this lack of interest could result in fewer individuals qualified for scientific careers and a population unprepared to engage with scientific societal issues, it is imperative to investigate ways in which interest in school science can be increased. Studies have suggested that inquiry learning is one way to increase interest in science. Inquiry learning forms the core of the primary syllabus in Singapore; as such, we examine how inquiry practices may shape students' perceptions of science and school science. This study investigates how classroom inquiry activities relate to students' interest in school science. Data were collected from 425 grade 4 students who responded to a questionnaire and 27 students who participated in follow-up focus group interviews conducted in 14 classrooms in Singapore. Results indicate that students have a high interest in science class. Additionally, self-efficacy and leisure-time science activities, but not gender, were significantly associated with an increased interest in school science. Interestingly, while hands-on activities are viewed as fun and interesting, connecting learning to real-life and discussing ideas with their peers had a greater relation to student interest in school science. These findings suggest that inquiry learning can increase Singaporean students' interest in school science; however, simply engaging students in hands-on activities is insufficient. Instead, student interest may be increased by ensuring that classroom activities emphasize the everyday applications of science and allow for peer discussion.     

Relationships among informal learning environments,teaching procedures and scientific reasoning ability

Informal learning experiences have risen to the forefront of science education as being beneficial to students' learning. However, it is not clear in what ways such experiences may be beneficial to students; nor how informal learning experiences may interface with classroom science instruction. This study aims to acquire a better understanding of these issues by investigating one aspect of science learning, scientific reasoning ability, with respect to the students' informal learning experiences and classroom science instruction. Specifically, the purpose of this study was to investigate possible differences in students' scientific reasoning abilities relative to their informal learning environments (impoverished, enriched), classroom teaching experiences (non-inquiry, inquiry) and the interaction of these variables. The results of two-way ANOVAs indicated that informal learning environments and classroom science teaching procedures showed significant main effects on students' scientific reasoning abilities. Students with enriched informal learning environments had significantly higher scientific reasoning abilities compared to those with impoverished informal learning environments. Likewise, students in inquirybased science classrooms showed higher scientific reasoning abilities compared to those in non-inquiry science classrooms. There were no significant interaction effects. These results indicate the need for increased emphases on both informal learning opportunities and inquiry-based instruction in science.     

Knowledge,beliefs and pedagogy: how the nature of science should inform the aims of science education (and not just when teaching evolution)

Lisa Borgerding’s work highlights how students can understand evolution without necessarily committing to it, and how learners may come to see it as one available way of thinking amongst others. This is presented as something that should be considered a successful outcome when teaching about material that many students may find incompatible with their personal worldviews. These findings derive from work exploring a cause célèbre of the science education community—the teaching of natural selection in cultural contexts where learners feel they have strong reasons for rejecting evolutionary ideas. Accepting that students may understand but not commit to scientific ideas that are (from some cultural perspectives) controversial may easily be considered as a form of compromise position when teaching canonical science prescribed in curriculum but resisted by learners. Yet if we take scholarship on the nature of science seriously, and wish to reflect the nature of scientific knowledge in science teaching, then the aim of science education should always be to facilitate understanding of, yet to avoid belief in, the ideas taught in science lessons. The philosophy of science suggests that scientific knowledge needs to be understood as theoretical in nature, as conjectural and provisional; and the history of science warns of the risks of strongly committing to any particular conceptualisation as a final account of some feature of nature. Research into student thinking and learning in science suggests that learning science is often a matter of coming to understand a new viable way of thinking about a topic to complement established ways of thinking. Science teaching should then seek to have students appreciate scientific ideas as viable ways of making sense of the currently available empirical evidence, but should not be about persuading students of the truth of any particular scientific account.     

Special Issue: Leaving the academy

Abstract

The nature of science is not commonly considered in undergraduate curricula. Why not? To examine such issues requires an examination of one's own beliefs in both what science is and how it should be pursued. Such uncomfortable questions can be seen as hard in that they lack consensus answers. They are also perceived as peripheral to scientific research and therefore will tend to be avoided in a research orientated environment.     

Women in Science, Engineering and Technology: A Review of The Issues

Concern continues to be expressed over women's difficulties in advancing their careers as academic scientists. Though some sciences may be numerically 'feminised', few women reach the upper echelons of science. Scant attention has been paid to issues of the progression of women from non–traditional backgrounds, such as those from ethnic minorities, who may be particularly disadvantaged. What research there is indicates a variation between the sciences in terms of women's careers and patterns that are replicated globally. Explanations are now focusing on how the scientific culture itself acts as a barrier to women rather than on the notion that women themselves lack the requisite skills. The Athena Project is a policy response to this issue. Future research and policy needs to look more closely at differences between the sciences, how women from diverse backgrounds experience the academic labour market and epistemological connections between employment and engagement with the scientific agenda.     

A National Science Fair: Exhibiting support for the knowledge economy

Student‐directed, open‐ended scientific investigations and invention projects may serve to deepen and broaden students’ scientific and technological literacy, and, in so doing, enable them to succeed in democracies greatly affected by processes and products of science and technology. Science fairs, events at which student‐led projects are evaluated and celebrated, could contribute to such positive personal and social outcomes. Qualitative data drawn from a national science fair over succeeding years indicate (after analyses of largely qualitative data, using constant comparative methods) that, apart from positive outcomes regarding science literacy, there may be some significant issues about the fair that warrant critical review. It is apparent from these studies that there are issues of access, image, and recruitment associated with the fair. Qualification for participation in the fair appears to favour students from advantaged, resource‐rich backgrounds. Although these students do benefit in a number of ways from the fair experience, it is apparent that science fairs also greatly benefit sponsors—who can, in a sense, use science fairs for promotional and recruitment purposes. These findings and claims raised, for us, some important questions possibly having implications for science education, and for society more generally.     

Bullying and the Postgraduate Secondary School Trainee Teacher: An English case study

This paper reports the findings of a study which investigated primary BEd student teachers' scientific backgrounds, attitudes towards science and towards teaching science, their confidence to teach science, and their scientific knowledge and understanding. The findings are discussed in relation to what primary teachers need to know in order to be able to teach science, and to our developing understanding of how science is perceived, experienced and understood by learners. The paper concludes with a discussion of the effectiveness of a pilot course developed to address the issues raised by the study. It is 'learner centred' and focused on the development of knowledge and understanding rather than process, and on factors likely to promote pupil (and student) understanding. The outcomes of the pilot work raise further substantive issues.     

Teleology as a tacit dimension of teaching and learning evolution: A sociological approach to classroom interaction in science education

Teleology has been described as an intuitive cognitive bias and as a major type of student conception. There is controversy regarding whether teleological explanations are a central obstacle to, are legitimate in, or are even supportive of science learning. However, interaction in science classrooms has not yet been investigated with regard to teleology. Consequently, this study addresses the question of how teleological explanations emerge in science classroom interactions about evolution and how teachers and students address emerging teleology. In this article, we introduce a theoretical and methodological framework drawing from the sociology of knowledge and systems theory, suggesting that this framework may enrich the understanding of knowledge construction and of social practices in the science classroom because it enables distinguishing between explicit and tacit knowledge. We investigated seven secondary school units about evolution and present data from four grade-12 classes in Germany, a country with very few creationists, to contrast two ways in which teleology is addressed. In the first type, the teachers combine intentional and need-based teleological explanations with aspects of scientific theories in an ambiguous way. Contrastingly, in the second type, the teachers construct a duality between correct mechanistic and incorrect teleological explanations by discrediting preceding scientific theories. In the discussion, we argue that the presented sociological approach can also be valuable in other science education contexts, such as creationism, the nature of science and socio-scientific issues, because classroom interaction involves tacit communication, such as a tacit epistemology, which are essential grounds for the students' knowledge construction.     

Evolution and the nature of science: On the historical discord and its implications for education

Research in the teaching and learning of evolutionary biology has revealed persistent difficulties in student understanding of fundamental Darwinian concepts. These difficulties may be traced, in part, to science instruction that is based on philosophical conceptions of science that are no longer viewed as adequately characterizing the diverse nature of scientific practice, especially in evolutionary biology. This mismatch between evolution as practiced and the nature of science as perceived by researchers and educators has a long history extending back to the publication of Darwin's theory of natural selection. An examination of how this theory was received by the scientific community of the time may provide insight into some of the difficulties that students have today in learning these important biological concepts. The primary difficulties center around issues of metaphysics and scientific method, aspects of the nature of science too often ignored in science education. Our intent is not to offer a specific course of action to remedy the problems educators currently face, but rather to suggest an alternative path one might take to eventually reach a solution. That path, we argue, should include the use of broader models of science that incorporate these elements of scientific practice to structure teaching and education research in evolution. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 35: 1069–1089, 1998     

Appeals to Science: Recirculation of Online Claims in Socioscientific Reasoning

Conflicting knowledge claims regarding complex issues have become readily available through networked digital media, and the introduction of Internet access to classrooms has provided opportunities for accessing a huge number of sources. Science education plays an important role in providing students opportunities to seek and evaluate information and engage in reasoning. The aim of this article is to analyze ways upper secondary science students invoke recirculated online claims originating from a scientific paper in conversations regarding genetically modified organisms (GMO), and to understand how such invocations are effective in order for students to engage accountably. By using the notion of communicative activity types—the meaning and function of the recirculated claims were analyzed in (1) a peer discussion, (2) a debate, and (3) a reflective seminar. The persuasive power of the discursive resource “appeals to science” is illustrated when students enlist scientific objectivity and rigor to underpin the credibility of arguments in a debate, and when qualifying a reflective position in a seminar, whereas they reflect on how actors in a Web context use appeals to science rhetorically when engaged in a discussion with peers reporting online claims. The study offers insight into kinds of communicative competences involved in conversations and how “scientific facts” justify, in this case, opposition to GMO. Finally, it is reflected upon the importance of not only learning how to make well-founded knowledge claims, but also to understand how science is used rhetorically in order to develop appropriate responses to complex issues in the digital age.

     

Science education as an exercise in foreign affairs

In Kuhnian terms, science education has been a process of inducting students into the reigning paradigms of science. In 1985, Duschl noted that science education had not kept pace with developments in the history and philosophy of science. The claim of certainty for scientific knowledge which science educators grounded in positivist philosophy was rendered untenable years ago and it turns out that social and cultural factors surrounding discovery may be at least as important as the justification of knowledge.Capitalizing on these new developments, Duschl, Hamilton, and Grandy (1990) wrote a compelling argument for the need to have a joint research effort in science education involving the philosophy and history of science along with cognitive psychology. However, the issue of discovery compels the research community go one step further. If the science education community has been guilty of neglecting historical and philosophical issues in science, let it not now be guilty of ignoring sociological issues in science. A collaborative view ought also to include the sociological study of cultural milieu in which scientific ideas arise. In other words, an external sociological perspective on science. The logic of discovery from a sociological point of view implies that conceptual change can also be viewed from a sociological perspective.     

Public understanding of science: from contents to processes

Public understanding of science is commonly seen in terms of lay persons' understanding of the contents of science. This article argues that it may be more salient to consider public understanding of the internal processes of science ‐ of the nature of scientific knowledge and of the sorts of information that science can reasonably be expected to provide. Drawing on the reported statements of non‐scientists in the media following the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident, the article argues that the view of scientific knowledge that many people appear to hold is not one that can help them interpret and cope successfully with sts issues. The role that formal science education plays in sustaining this unhelpful view of science is discussed and some implications for practice are considered.     

Rethinking the ethics of scientific knowledge: A case study of teaching the environment in science classrooms

In this paper we argue that scientific literacy ought to be rethought in that it involves ethics as its core element. Considering the fact that science education has addressed ethical dilemmas of Science, Technology, Society and Environment (STSE) issues, it is worthwhile to question what the ethics of scientific knowledge mean in terms of their implications in modern society where knowledge generally is separated from action and thereby from the responsibility for knowing. We draw on the concept of integrity of knowing to analyze knowledge about the environment in Korean sixth—grade science classrooms. Examining the notion of immediate coping and ConfucianCheng, we differentiate ‘knowing about ethics’ and ‘knowing ethically’ with respect to STSE issues. We challenge the notion of knowing, suggesting instead that there is not only knowing about but knowingin andfor action. Participatory scientific literacy ought to aim for the latter form of knowing. This understanding of ethics and scientific literacy could help science educators bring forth the responsibility for knowledge in science classrooms by encouraging students to become active and responsible concerning STSE issues.     

Students' Meaning‐making of Socio‐scientific Issues in Computer Mediated Settings: Exploring learning through interaction trajectories

This article reports on a study concerning secondary school students’ meaning‐making of socio‐scientific issues in Information and Communication Technology‐mediated settings. Our theoretical argument has as its point of departure the analytical distinction between ‘doing science’ and ‘doing school,’ as two different forms of classroom activity. In the study we conducted an analysis of students working with web‐based groupware systems concerned with genetics. The analysis identified how the students oriented their accounts of scientific concepts and how they attempted to understand the socio‐scientific task in different ways. Their orientations were directed towards finding scientific explanations, towards exploring the ethical and social consequences, and towards ‘fact‐finding.’ The students’ different orientations seemed to contribute to an ambivalent tension, which, on the one hand, was productive because it urged them into ongoing discussions and explicit meaning‐making. On the other hand, however, the tension elucidated how complex and challenging collaborative learning situations can be. Our findings suggest that in order to obtain a deeper understanding of students’ meaning‐making of socio‐scientific issues in Information and Communication Technology‐mediated settings, it is important not only to address how students perform the activity of ‘doing science.’ It is equally important to be sensitive with respect to how students orient their talk and activity towards more or less explicit values, demands, and expectations embedded in the educational setting. In other words, how students perform the activity of ‘doing school.’