Developing a conceptual model for students’ scientific civic engagement self-concept

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ABSTRACT To prepare students to meet challenges of the twenty-first century, science educators must equip students with science literacy skills and the means to apply those skills to benefit their communities, i.e. science civic engagement (SCE) with dimensions of civic knowledge, civic confidence, civic action and civic value. In a college-level science literacy course we investigated students’ SCE self-concept (SCE-SC) or how they envision their ability to use their science knowledge and skills to impact their communities using a pre and post-instruction Likert-scale self-report instrument along with one open-response question. We found in students’ written response describing their SCE-SC that while students may not consistently identify mechanisms for using science to help their communities, they do believe that science skills will benefit their communities. We also observed positive relationships between SCE-SC and both science identity and perceived cohesion to a community, suggesting these are important aspects of SCE-SC development. While overall SCE-SC did not increase after the completion of the science literacy course, we did observe a significant increase in scientific civic knowledge. We suggest that classroom experiences aimed at supporting civic engagement teach science skills through examples grounded in salient community contexts.