Important Component Of Scientific Literacy Research Articles

NATURAL SCIENCE TEXTBOOK AND THE CURRENT PREPAREDNESS OF TEACHERS IN TEACHING THIS SUBJECT

In developed European countries, the content of Natural Science (Science) has played a significant role in national curricula over the past thirty years. Understanding the concept of Natural Science (Science) content, which is an important component of scientific literacy and integrates natural sciences, history of science, sociology of science, and philosophy of psychology, is essential for teachers and students to be scientifically literate. This understanding involves a combination of key structures of scientific activity and the knowledge of natural science, which are necessary for scientific literacy [1,2,3].

Exploring Pre-service Science Teachers’ Perspectives on the Nature of Science: A Comparative Study Between China and Canada

The Nature of Science (NOS) is an important component of scientific literacy. Science teachers’ Views of the Nature of Science (VNOS) directly affect their teaching behaviors. Therefore, it is of great significance to explore science teachers’ VNOS and find ways of improvement. This study was designed to comparatively investigate preservice science teachers’ VNOS between China and Canada. The study employed a survey design to explore how Chinese and Canadian preservice science teachers understood the seven different aspects of NOS. Data showed that preservice science teachers in China and Canada both hold a modern view about science education. The level of Chinese and Canadian participants’ understanding of NOS was above the relatively naive level. Chinese teachers had better macro-understanding toward science education, but their micro-mastery was insufficient. The Canadian participants had a better understanding of the NOS than their Chinese counterparts. The study suggested that there is a need to reconstruct the preservice science teacher education curriculum in China and promote the transformation in the science teacher educational system.

Measuring Nature of Science Views of Middle School Students

Developing scientific literacy for all students is the most often stated purpose of contemporary science education. Nature of science (NOS) is seen as an important component of scientific literacy. There are various perceptions of NOS in the science education community and NOS itself is an ever-changing construct. This makes it challenging to develop instruments for measuring understanding of NOS at different levels. Many instruments have been developed and are being developed to assess NOS learning, which indicates the importance attributed to this subject. In this study, we developed a multiple-choice test to measure NOS understanding of middle school students. The instrument was applied to 1397 middle school students. The 24 item multiple-choice test had KR-20 reliability coefficient of 0.74. A 12 item multiple-choice test created as a subset of the 24 items of the original test. This test was easier and had higher discrimination, which can provide useful measurement data about students’ understanding of NOS for diagnostic or formative purposes.

Making Decisions with Data: Understanding Hypothesis Testing & Statistical Significance

Statistical methods are indispensable to the practice of science. But statistical hypothesis testing can seem daunting, with P-values, null hypotheses, and the concept of statistical significance. This article explains the concepts associated with statistical hypothesis testing using the story of “the lady tasting tea,” then walks the reader through an application of the independent-samples t-test using data from Peter and Rosemary Grant's investigations of Darwin's finches. Understanding how scientists use statistics is an important component of scientific literacy, and students should have opportunities to use statistical methods like this in their science classes.

Teachers’ Beliefs About Learning and Teaching Nature of Science: Professional Development Program

The Nature of Science (NOS) is an important component of science literacy, which is the main vision of science teaching programs. In contrast, science teachers face significant problems in transferring the nature of science to classroom practices. Science teachers' classroom practices are influenced by their belief in learning and teaching. Therefore, the development of teachers' beliefs in learning and teaching the NOS is important for the development of classroom practices. Thus, in this research, the effect of a continuing professional development (CPD) program aimed at improving science teachers’ professional competences related to the NOS on their beliefs about learning and teaching of the NOS was searched. 18 volunteered science teachers participated in the research. A single group pretest-posttest experimental design was used in the study. The data were collected using the ‘’Beliefs About Reformed Science Teaching and Learning (BARSTL)’’developed by Sampson and Benton (2006) and the ‘’Scale of Self-Efficacy Belief About Teaching the Nature of Science’’ developed by researchers. Pre-test and post-test performances of the teachers were compared using the Wilcoxon test. As a result of the research, it has been shown that the CPD program is effective in developing teachers' self-efficacy beliefs about teaching the NOS and teachers’ beliefs for reform approaches. Findings show that science teachers' self-efficacy beliefs are quite high, even though their views on the nature of science are inadequate before the professional development program. There is a risk that teachers who have inadequate views and misconceptions about NOS but who are eager to teach and who have high self-efficacy will be an obstacle to the education of science literate individuals. This has further clarified the need for CPD programs that will enable them to face current misconceptions and support their classroom practices, without compromising teachers' enthusiasm and self-efficacy about NOS that is important component of scientific literacy. For this reason, it has been proposed to increase the number of such professional development programs in accordance with the changing professional development paradigms.

Informal Science Education in the Footsteps of Galileo’s Dialogue

In this paper, the inclusion of History and Philosophy of Science in non-formal and informal science education is proposed in order to provide students with the opportunity to grasp some aspects of Nature of Science with which they are not familiarized in the context of formal education. The cultural aspects of science, which is an important component of scientific literacy, are presented in an informal education context: in this case, a Science Festival. An interactively narrative inspired by Galileo’s Dialogue is used in order to engage junior high school students with History of Science and to enhance their conceptual understanding of cultural aspects of science.

Risk in Science Instruction

Risk is always present in people’s lives: diseases, new technologies, socio-scientific issues (SSIs) such as climate change, and advances in medicine—to name just a few examples—all carry risks. To be able to navigate risks in everyday life, as well as to participate in social debate on risk-related issues, students need to develop risk competence. Science education can be a powerful tool in supporting students’ risk competence, which is an important component of scientific literacy. As there are different definitions of risk within the scientific community, the aims of this article are (1) to review the literature on two major theoretical frameworks for conceptualising risk, the realist, and the constructivist paradigms of risk and (2) to connect both in order to suggest a working definition of what can be understood as risk competence in science instruction.

Representation of socioscientific issues in the most popular Turkish daily newspapers

Socioscientific issues (SSIs) have become important in science education because of their feature of important component of scientific literacy. The purpose of this study is to analyze the representation of SSIs in Turkish national newspapers. The methodology employed in the present study is content analysis. The archives of newspapers were online searched for predetermined SSIs, news titles were categorized according to content and year. And then, samples of news tittle were selected from various newspapers for each issue tittle and were demonstrated with newspaper name and publishing year. The results demonstrated that the most mentioned SSIs are nuclear energy, environmental pollution/problems, and global warming in the last 11 years. Moreover, a steady was seen in the SSIs between 2004 and 2014. Interpretations are given in more detail in results and discussion.

Research Trends on Socioscientific Issues: A Content Analysis of Publications in Selected Science Education Journals

Socioscientific issues (SSIs) have gained recently more importance in science education. SSIs are an important component of scientific literacy. SSIs are social dilemmas including conceptual or technological links to science. The present study aims to determine SSIs related research trends via content analyses of the articles published from 2004 to 2015 in five selected science education journals (SE, JRST, S&E, IJSE and RSE). Therefore, first, five journals with the highest impact factor were selected. Then, SSIs related papers were determined using electronic database search and thus 122 SSIs related articles were analyzed to determine trends in timeline, research types, related research topics, and research sample groups. The results show that SSIs related articles increased steadily leading to a peak in 2012 with the highest publishing rate in IJSE. Most of the SSIs related research employed qualitative methods. The highest rate of SSIs related qualitative studies was determined in IJSE (50.00%), and the lowest in S&E (3.57%). However quantitative methods were employed the least. In the relevant SSIs related research published about argumentation, decision-making, and informal reasoning were the most frequent SSIs related topics. The most studied research sample groups consisted of junior and senior high school students. Preschoolers were not among the sample groups. These findings indicate SSIs progressed throughout the years for paving the way for further SSIs related research studies.

COMPARATIVE RESEARCH ON THE UNDERSTANDINGS OF NATURE OF SCIENCE AND SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY BETWEEN SCIENCE TEACHERS FROM SHANGHAI AND CHICAGO

Nature of science is considered to be an important component of scientific literacy, and understanding the nature of science is advocated as an important goal of science education. Scientific inquiry is regarded as the core of curriculum reform, which has become the consensus of the international K-12 science education, as well as a scientific direction for which educators have been striving over the last century. To compare the views of nature of science and scientific inquiry of teachers between China and United States, 90 high school science teachers from Shanghai and Chicago are chosen to do open-ended questionnaires and interviews. By conducting the sequential mixed method and using the empirical investigations of VNOS-D and VOSI-S, their different understandings mainly perform in the specific aspects of nature of science and scientific inquiry, cognitive stages, types and relationships etc. Overall, the level of American teachers’ views of nature of science and science inquiry are better than Chinese. Finally, some suggestions on Chinese science teachers’ education are proposed. Key words: epistemological belief in science, nature of science, scientific inquiry.

Teachers Describe Epistemologies of Science Instruction Through Q Methodology

Creating scientifically literate students is a common goal among educational stakeholders. An understanding of nature of science is an important component of scientific literacy in K‐12 science education. Q methodology was used to investigate the opinions of preservice and in‐service teachers on how they intend to teach or currently teach science. Q methodology is a measurement tool designed to capture personal beliefs. Participants included 40 preservice and in‐service elementary and secondary science teachers who sorted 40 self‐referential statements regarding science instruction. The results identified three epistemologies toward teaching science: A Changing World, My Beliefs, and Tried and True. Participants with the A Changing World epistemology believe evidence is reliable, scientific knowledge is generated in multiple ways, and science changes in light of new evidence. The My Beliefs epistemology reflects that scientific knowledge is subject to change due to embedded bias, science is affected by culture and religion, and evolution should not be taught in the classroom. The Tried and True epistemology views a scientific method as an exact method to prove science, believes experiments are crucial for scientific discoveries, absolute truth exists in scientific knowledge, and society and cultural factors can be eliminated from investigations. Implications for preservice teacher education programs and in‐service teacher professional development are addressed.

The development and implementation of an instrument to assess students' data analysis skills in molecular biology.

Developing visual literacy skills is an important component of scientific literacy in undergraduate science education. Comprehension, analysis, and interpretation are parts of visual literacy that describe related data analysis skills important for learning in the biological sciences. The Molecular Biology Data Analysis Test (MBDAT) was developed to measure students’ data analysis skills connected with scientific reasoning when analyzing and interpreting scientific data generated from experimental research. The skills analyzed included basic skills, such as identification of patterns and trends in data and connecting a method that generated the data, and advanced skills, such as distinguishing positive and negative controls, synthesizing conclusions, determining if data supports a hypothesis, and predicting alternative or next-step experiments. Construct and content validity were established and calculated statistical parameters demonstrate that the MBDAT is valid and reliable for measuring students’ data analysis skills in molecular and cell biology contexts. The instrument also measures students’ perceived confidence in their data interpretation abilities. As scientific research continues to evolve in complexity, interpretation of scientific information in visual formats will continue to be an important component of scientific literacy. Thus science education will need to support and assess students’ development of these skills as part of students’ scientific training.

Students’ Risk Perceptions of Nanotechnology Applications: Implications for science education

Scientific literacy as a goal of a science education reform remains an important discourse in the research literature and is a key component of students’ understanding and acceptance of emergent technologies like nanotechnology. This manuscript focuses on undergraduate engineering students’ perceptions of the risks and benefits posed by nanotechnology as an important component of scientific literacy. Specifically, this study examined the perceived risk of nanotechnology of a group of American students (N = 102) in three material science engineering courses focusing on nanotechnology. Students completed a survey of risk perception and a sub‐sample were interviewed (n = 21). It was found that perceptions of risks and benefits of nanotechnology tended to be closely tied to specific groups of applications including common consumer products, health‐related products, and advanced technological applications. The intersection of scientific application and perception is discussed in the context of science education curriculum considerations.

Marginalized discourses and scientific literacy

The central position of this article is that an important component of scientific literacy is an understanding of the reciprocal impact of science and the general culture on each other. The article focuses on the marginalized discourses that have arisen to oppose the racism, sexism, and classism espoused and advocated by mainstream science since its institutionalization until the first half of the 20th century. The article explores the pedagogical value of studying these oppositional discourses to demonstrate the permeability of the boundaries between science and the general culture. It also discusses how the issues raised by these discourses can be used to enhance the scientific literacy of students. J Res Sci Teach 35: 365–374, 1998.

Marginalized discourses and scientific literacy

The central position of this article is that an important component of scientific literacy is an understanding of the reciprocal impact of science and the general culture on each other. The article focuses on the marginalized discourses that have arisen to oppose the racism, sexism, and classism espoused and advocated by mainstream science since its institutionalization until the first half of the 20th century. The article explores the pedagogical value of studying these oppositional discourses to demonstrate the permeability of the boundaries between science and the general culture. It also discusses how the issues raised by these discourses can be used to enhance the scientific literacy of students. J Res Sci Teach 35: 365–374, 1998.

The impact of science curricula on student views about the nature of science

AbstractThis review of the literature focused on three decades of research related to precollege student understandings about the nature of science. Various interpretations of what aspects characterize the nature of science were examined, revealing an agreement among scientists, science educators, and those involved in policy‐making arenas that the nature of science is multifaceted and an important component of scientific literacy. A summary of the research regarding the adequacies of student conceptions about the nature of science revealed inconsistent results. Although the majority of studies show that student understandings are less than desirable, there is research that indicates that student conceptions are acceptable. Research on the impact of instructional materials and techniques on student understandings was also reviewed. The effects of language in science instruction, the content emphasis of instructional materials, integrated science curricula, and instruction in general were curricular variables found to have a negative impact on student understandings about the nature of science. Empirical evidence about the success of innovative instructional materials and techniques designed to facilitate more adequate understandings of the nature of science is needed.