Science Education Research Articles

How Are The Science Process Skills of Prospective Science Teacher Students: Studies in Inorganic Chemistry and Gender

Prospective teacher students must be able to design practicums so that the learning process is meaningful. The skills that students develop in carrying out scientific discoveries, namely applying concepts, rules, and characteristics that exist in science, are called science process skills (SPS). Therefore, in building students' knowledge, students must have process skills in teaching so they can teach effectively and must have a good understanding of concepts and strong process skills. This research aims to describe the SPS of prospective science education teacher students through inorganic chemistry courses after going through learning with the discovery learning model. This research uses a quantitative approach with a pre-experimental design one-shot case study research method. The research results show that student SPS as a whole is in the high category with an average percentage of 59.71%. SPS analysis in classes A, B, and C, respectively, has an average percentage of 58.23%, 62.66%, and 58.24% in the high category. SPS analysis based on gender shows that the respective percentage of male students is 53.89% with the medium category for women and 59.81% for the high category.

Complex Instruction: developing teachers’ professional knowledge and practice in Brazil

ABSTRACT ‘Programa de Especialização Docente Brasil’ (PED Brasil) is a learning and professional development program in mathematics or science education for primary or secondary in-service schoolteachers. Designed to be a teacher education program that addresses issues related to educational quality and equity in racially, socially, and academically diverse Brazilian schools, PED Brasil intended to craft a program with a signature pedagogy that could be capable of shaping the ways of thinking and acting in the teaching profession. PED Brasil does it by integrating different dimensions of knowledge and demonstrating various aspects of professional practice, considering the democratic society we aim to build. In this paper, we analyse how PED Brasil has adopted Complex Instruction as its signature pedagogy.

The Influence of the STAD and NHT Learning Models on Students' Cognitive Achievement and Learning Motivation on Colloid Material in Banyumas

This study aims to assess the impact of the Student Team Achievement Division (STAD) and Numbered Head Together (NHT) learning models on students’ cognitive achievement and learning motivation in colloidal material at MA Negeri 1 Banyumas. The study uses a quantitative approach with a quasi-experimental design, involving students from six XI science classes of MA Negeri 1 Banyumas. The first experimental group was taught using the STAD model, while the second group was taught using the NHT model. The sampling technique used was random sampling. Instruments included multiple-choice tests to measure cognitive achievement and learning motivation. Data analysis was carried out using an independent t-test. The results showed that both the STAD and NHT models had a significant impact on students’ cognitive achievement and learning motivation in colloid material. The p-values ​​for the NHT learning model were 0.47 and 0.39, while the p-values ​​for the STAD learning model were 0.17 and 0.16.

Science teachers' beliefs about teaching and learning related to content and procedural goals

AbstractScience teachers' beliefs about teaching and learning are a vital component of teachers' professional competence and are often assumed to impact classroom practice. To date, these beliefs have been predominantly investigated regarding teaching and learning in general or for a particular science subject (e.g., physics). It remains to be determined whether these beliefs are similar across different goals within a subject. The study reported addresses this question by investigating and comparing beliefs about teaching and learning regarding two prominent main goals of science education: content goals that refer to scientific phenomena, laws, theories, and disciplinary core ideas and procedural goals that refer to scientific procedures and practices. To that end, data from 170 German teachers were collected in 2019 and 2020 with an online questionnaire. After modeling the data and assessing the quality of measurement via Rasch analysis techniques, subsequent t‐tests were employed to compare beliefs. Results reveal that science teachers' beliefs vary between both main goals. For instance, teachers believe that achieving procedural goals requires primarily doing science with lesser relevance of discussing and elaborating with students explicitly the rules and strategies for engaging appropriately in scientific practices (e.g., control of variables strategy). In contrast, teachers believe that for achieving content goals, explicit instruction about corresponding conceptual knowledge is of higher relevance. Furthermore, the analysis reveals differences in teachers' beliefs about their own abilities. Teachers typically believe they are more able to teach and deal with content goals compared with procedural goals. The differences reported may help to understand research on teachers' classroom practice and can inform teacher training and professional development.

Hurdling obstructions on instructional management of science teachers in schools with challenging laboratory resources

Lacking the resources for hands-on scientific experimentation could impact both students' educational experiences and their long-term proficiency. Without access to laboratories, students miss out on crucial opportunities to engage in practical applications of theoretical concepts, hindering their ability to comprehend scientific principles fully. The purpose of this exploratory study was to analyze the experiences of science teachers (n=20) from last-mile schools in the Philippines. Narratives from science teachers were the primary data in this study being collected through one-on-one interview. Thematic analysis revealed that the science teachers were challenged by insufficient resources available in their laboratories while others conduct experiments only in their classrooms while having class. Adapting to their concerns, teachers were able to maintain their instructional competence through hands-on demonstrations, visual and audio-visual presentations, interactive activities, and printout instruction. For science teachers, addressing these challenges requires concerted efforts from policymakers, educational institutions, and stakeholders to ensure equitable access to resources and professional development opportunities for teachers. The study emphasized the need for sustainable solutions to bridge the gap between resource-rich and resource-poor schools, ultimately enhancing students' educational experiences and long-term proficiency in science.

Fit to teach evolution? Pre- and in-service teachers’ knowledge and acceptance of evolution

ABSTRACT Students need a clear grasp of evolution to understand biology and the world’s current environmental crises. Science teachers are essential in fostering evolution knowledge in their students. Numerous European studies have shown that science teachers possess a broad spectrum of alternative conceptions of evolution, and their acceptance of evolution varies. School curricula increasingly include key concepts of evolution from early grades on. However, studies are limited that examine differences in understandings and acceptance of evolution in different country contexts. This study investigated the knowledge and acceptance of evolution in Swiss science teachers: 1352 pre- and in-service year K-9 teachers were surveyed using two established questionnaires (KAEVO 2.0 and ATEVO). The results showed that as a group, pre-service kindergarten and primary school teachers had a poor grasp of evolution, while pre-and in-service lower secondary school teachers had moderate knowledge. However, we found that knowledge of evolution varied a great deal across the groups and that teachers in all groups had a range of alternative conceptions of evolution. Acceptance of evolution was high for all groups. Given that currently, prospective teachers on some educational tracks do not study evolution at all, our findings have important implications for teacher education in the sciences.

Effects of concept mapping on students’ science learning: secondary schools of Habru Woreda, Amhara Region-Ethiopia

Effects of concept mapping on students’ science learning: secondary schools of Habru Woreda, Amhara Region-Ethiopia

Pengembangan Asesmen Pembelajaran Berbasis Game pada Mata Pelajaran IPA Kelas VII SMP

This study aims to develop a game-based learning assessment in science subjects in grade VII junior high school that is valid and practical. This type of research is Research and Development (R&D). The model used in this development research is a 4D model. The 4D model contains 4 (four) stages of development, including define, design, develop, and disseminate. The research data was obtained through questionnaires and validation sheets, then analyzed in a quantitative descriptive manner. The development process of this game-based learning assessment product has involved a validation stage by material and media experts. A science teacher in grade VII of SMP Negeri 5 Linggo Sari Baganti acted as a material expert, while two lecturers from the Department of Curriculum and Educational Technology of Padang State University acted as media experts. The validation results show that this product is considered very valid, both in terms of material content and design. Furthermore, the trial on 18 grade VII students also produced very positive data, with an average score of 4.71 for the practicality category. Based on these results, it can be concluded that this game-based learning assessment product has gone through a good development stage and is ready to be implemented in the learning process

Cross-Cultural Biology Teaching Using Next-Generation Science Standards

This study explored Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in cross-cultural biology teaching through collaborative lesson studies involving educators from the USA and the Philippines. We employed grounded theory and examined iterative feedback processes during lesson development to refine learning exemplars. Learning exemplars validation affirmed their alignment with both NGSS and the Philippine science education frameworks, ensuring cultural relevance and educational rigor. Five key themes were identified as pivotal: retrieval of prior knowledge, fostering meaningful learning experiences, enhancing memory and retention, fostering active engagement, and cultivating critical thinking skills—integral for developing culturally responsive curricula. Moreover, students became independent learners, responsible for their learning, reflective and critical thinkers, problem solvers, inquiry-oriented, creative, collaborative communicators, modelers, data analysts, persistent, adaptable, and self-directed. Implications include enhancing educational policies to support cultural diversity and integrating cross-cultural learning exemplars to enhance global teaching practices. This study underscored the transformative potential of cross-cultural collaboration in advancing science education, fostering engaging learning environments, and preparing students for global citizenship.

Embodied learning of science concepts through augmented reality technology

AbstractAugmented Reality (AR) revolutionizes educational approaches by providing an immersive experience that superimposes virtual 3D elements onto the physical environment. This integration of virtual and real worlds addresses the challenge of understanding abstract concepts by enabling three-dimensional visualization and interaction. This study aims to assess the role of embodied cognition in science learning through AR technology, analyze its impact on collaborative, inquiry-based learning in primary science, and understand students' perceptions of its influence on their engagement and comprehension in collaborative science tasks. Data collection methods for this study included three focus group interviews and five video observations involving ten grade 5 students, totaling 23 participants, in a primary science classroom. The analysis utilized content, thematic, and multimodal frameworks to evaluate student interactions. The findings indicated that the use of AR significantly enhanced the students' learning experiences. Students' comprehension of complex scientific concepts improved through active engagement with 3D models using the AR application. The AR app's 3D virtual shapes encouraged students to move around more during lessons, likely because these shapes were engaging and offered various perspectives. The use of embodied learning was enhanced with the support of AR technology, as students were constantly in motion around the table, using their fingers to manipulate objects and explore 3D forms from different angles.

Simple Recurrent Networks are Interactive.

There is disagreement among cognitive scientists as to whether a key computational framework - the Simple Recurrent Network (SRN; Elman, Machine Learning, 7(2), 195-225, 1991; Elman, Cognitive Science, 14(2), 179-211, 1990) - is a feedforward system. SRNs have been essential tools in advancing theories of learning, development, and processing in cognitive science for more than three decades. If SRNs were feedforward systems, there would be pervasive theoretical implications: Anything an SRN can do would therefore be explainable without interaction (feedback). However, despite claims that SRNs (and by extension recurrent neural networks more generally) are feedforward (Norris, 1993), this is not the case. Feedforward networks by definition are acyclic graphs - they contain no loops. SRNs contain loops - from hidden units back to hidden units with a time delay - and are therefore cyclic graphs. As we demonstrate, they are interactive in the sense normally implied for networks with feedback connections between layers: In an SRN, bottom-up inputs are inextricably mixed with previous model-internal computations. Inputs are transmitted to hidden units by multiplying them by input-to-hidden weights. However, hidden units simultaneously receive their own previous activations as input via hidden-to-hidden connections with a one-step time delay (typically via context units). These are added to the input-to-hidden values, and the sums are transformed by an activation function. Thus, bottom-up inputs are mixed with the products of potentially many preceding transformations of inputs and model-internal states. We discuss theoretical implications through a key example from psycholinguistics where the status of SRNs as feedforward or interactive has crucial ramifications.

Enabling Impacts: Building a Broader Impacts Community of Practice at a Land-Grant University

The Broader Impacts (BI) activities required of researchers funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) often involve public engagement, including K-12 outreach, informal science education, public exhibits and performances, advocacy and policy change, and business and entrepreneurship. The ARIS Broader Impacts Toolkit (Advancing Research Impacts in Society, 2024) is an online resource designed to help researchers develop BI plans for their NSF proposals. Several elements of the Toolkit address critical aspects of public engagement, making the Toolkit a valuable resource for researchers new to BI or public engagement, especially when integrated into wider BI communities of practice. We discuss how the national-level BI Community of Practice (BI-CoP) developed and sustained by the NSF-funded Center for Advancing Research Impacts in Society (ARIS) contributed to the development and continuing evolution of an institutional-level BI CoP at a large land-grant public university. The personal narratives of members of the institutional-level BI-CoP reveal how the ARIS BI-CoP has supported their learning, fostered collaboration around BI at their institution, supported the development of an institutional BI-CoP, and increased their capacity to assist researchers with developing and implementing BI plans. The experiences of consultants and researchers demonstrate that supportive and well-resourced BI-CoPs at the national and institutional level are essential for making effective use of the Toolkit and developing BI plans that are innovative, inclusive, and impactful.

Examining Teachers’ Computational Thinking Skills, Collaborative Learning, and Creativity Within the Framework of Sustainable Education

This study seeks to explore the relationship between science teachers’ computational thinking skills, collaborative learning attitudes, and their creativity in the context of sustainable education. The study adopted an explanatory sequential design, which is one of the designs used in mixed-method research. A total of 369 science teachers were included in the quantitative phase of the study. Quantitative data were collected using three different scales. These scales included the “Computational Thinking Scale”, “Online Cooperative Learning Attitude Scale (OCLAS)”, and “Creative Self-Efficacy Scale”. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM), confirmatory factor analysis, and path analysis were conducted to analyze the quantitative data. The qualitative phase of the study consisted of nine science teachers. Data were collected with a semi-structured interview form by considering the scores obtained from the scales. Qualitative data were analyzed through descriptive analysis. It was found that science teachers’ computational thinking skills and collaborative learning attitudes significantly predicted their creativity within the framework of sustainable education. As a result of the interviews conducted, it was concluded that science teachers lacked computational thinking skills. It is critical to provide teachers with guidance on how to integrate computational thinking skills into their subject areas. Science teachers’ knowledge of computational thinking skills can be enhanced, and computational thinking skills can be included in all teacher education programs.

Character Education Based on Local Wisdom in Learning Science: A Systematic Literature

Character education based on local wisdom is an effort to prevent the decline of ethical and moral values among the younger generation in the educational process. This literature review aims to discuss the cultivation of local wisdom-based character education for students within science learning. The method used in this study is a Narrative Literature Review (NLR). Data collection was conducted through the Science Direct, Scopus and Google Scholar databases, focusing on articles published from 2018 to April 2024. The results of the literature review indicate that local wisdom-based character education in science learning can be effectively instilled in schools by integrating the potential of local wisdom with extracurricular activities, practicums or group learning, local tourism-based learning models, game-based learning, and interactions between students using local languages.

Educational practices with gender perspective in science education: perceptions of teacher educators and pre-service teachers

ABSTRACT This study characterizes the perception of gender-sensitive practices among pre-service teachers and teacher educators in science teacher education programs. A 23-item questionnaire was completed by 238 pre-service teachers and 25 teacher educators to identify gender-sensitive practices recognized in their courses and the number of gender equity activities they participated in. No significant differences were found in the perception of gender-sensitive practices based on gender, although males showed higher participation in activities (31.2%). Teacher educators perceived a lower proportion of gender-sensitive practices (41.9%) but engaged more in gender equity activities (61.9% compared to 23.5% for pre-service teachers). A significant positive correlation (0.397) was found between the perception of gender-sensitive practices and activity attendance, while age had a negative correlation (-0.241) with this perception. The findings suggest that the role of being a pre-service teacher or educator is more influential than gender in shaping perceptions. Although participation in the activities positively influences the perception of gender-sensitive practices, the participants of these activities is a consistent group. It is recommended to increase access to gender equity activities, focusing particularly on teacher educators and considering age as a factor to enhance effectiveness.

Evaluating and improving the predictive accuracy of mixing enthalpies and volumes in disordered alloys from universal pretrained machine learning potentials

The advent of machine learning in materials science opens the way for exciting and ambitious simulations of large systems and long time scales with the accuracy of calculations. Recently, several pretrained universal machine learned interatomic potentials (UPMLIPs) have been published, i.e., potentials distributed with a single set of weights trained to target systems across a very wide range of chemistries and atomic arrangements. These potentials raise the hope of reducing the computational cost and methodological complexity of performing simulations compared to models that require for-purpose training. However, the application of these models needs critical evaluation to assess their usability across material types and properties. In this work, we investigate the application of the following UPMLIPs: MACE, CHGNET, and M3GNET to the context of alloy theory. We calculate the mixing enthalpies and volumes of 21 binary alloy systems and compare the results with DFT calculations to assess the performance of these potentials over different properties and types of materials. We find that the small relative energies necessary to correctly predict mixing energies are generally not reproduced by these methods with sufficient accuracy to describe correct mixing behaviors. However, the performance can be significantly improved by supplementing the training data with relevant training data. The potentials can also be used to partially accelerate these calculations by replacing the structural relaxation step. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

In our Time: Adult Education and Birkbeck: Extra-Mural — An Experiment 1988–2009

In this article I suggest that three strands of adult education in the nineteenth century contributed to the experiment of the affiliation of Extra-Mural Studies and Birkbeck between 1988 and 2009: those of the mechanics’ institutions, the University of London, and Extra-Mural (‘Extension’). Although these strands had distinct origins, they were all respondents to the popular demand of the day for access to education by adults excluded from further and higher education in Oxbridge, which was full-time, residential, expensive, and confined to Anglicans and young men. The alternatives that adult education offered were secular and non-residential. They included part-time, evening teaching of subjects that reflected student demand. Adult education from the 1820s provided classes in practical science, mathematics, modern languages, English literature, and vocational training in mechanics, and in London University, medicine and law. In their parallel development, during which they all changed radically, these types of adult education were unmistakably hybrid, imitating each other in course selection and delivery, and sometimes competing for students. Extra-Mural joined the university in 1904 as its External Department, while Birkbeck joined the University of London in 1924 as a separate college, giving up, however, its daytime teaching, its intake of students of all ages, and the teaching of economics, to fit into the university without friction. The second part of the article explores one example of a productive partnership in the college between Extra-Mural and a Birkbeck department: English in Extra-Mural and the Department of English over the two decades that Extra-Mural was part of Birkbeck. Lastly, the article considers how the college privileged the other strands of adult education and shed Extra-Mural by integrating its full-time staff and on-site courses, and silently obliterating its vast provision of classes across the capital. A colour-coded Timeline follows this article to help trace the development of adult education that impacted on Birkbeck, and its lurches and adjustments to survive, from 1823 onwards.

"We are Water Warriors":

Elementary-aged children with a team of science, theater, and literacy educators performed the Chicago Global Water Dances in 2023. Global Water Dances (GWD) is an international initiative to raise awareness about water issues, promote sustainability, and inspire action to protect water resources through dance performed by a local body of Water. Through the Chicago Global Water Dances, children articulated several messages about the necessity of, and right to, clean water and highlighted the collective responsibility to protect this precious resource.

СAN THE KAZAKH LANGUAGE BECOME A FUNDAMENTAL FACTOR IN THE NATION-BUILDING OF KAZAKHSTAN?

Nation-building is not a one-day process and must be planned for the medium and long term. In nation-building, there are several aspects on which it is based, and the language used is one of the main ones. Countries were created on the principles of language, culture, and territorial affiliation. Therefore, the further formation of the nation for Kazakhstan is a very pressing issue today. This article examines the issue of nation-building in Kazakhstan using such a key tool as language. Thus, the article examines the research question: is the Kazakh language capable of becoming a full-fledged basis for building a nation in Kazakhstan today? The study used the results of a sociological and expert survey, which were conducted as part of the order of the Language Policy Committee of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan in 2023. The survey showed the level of proficiency and use of the Kazakh language among the Kazakh population, broken down by regions and ethnic groups. An expert survey identified the reasons for the weak distribution and use of the Kazakh language, and expert recommendations were provided. All these data were summarized and analysed in this article.

Education and Team Science in Neurocritical Care

Education and Team Science in Neurocritical Care