Many museums deal with socio-scientific issues--meaning topics with multiple perspectives and ongoing research, such as climate change, vaccinations, or livestock farming. As important and trusted sources of science education, museums can play a critical role in raising awareness about such issues. They tend to highlight the various perspectives…

Few empirical studies in Science Education have investigated the contributions of integrating scientific practices such as argumentation and modelling. In this article, I examine the characteristics of high school students' argumentative dialogues in different modelling situations. From this, I discuss the influences of modelling and the nature of…

The rise of social media platforms and subsequent lack of traditional gatekeeping mechanisms have enabled the proliferation of scientific disinformation. Users attempting to properly evaluate scientific information and disinformation are immensely obstructed by media communication mechanisms such as filter bubbles and echo chambers. Given the…

When secondary school students were asked about the socioscientific issue of using sodium fluoroacetate (1080) poison to control New Zealand's possum pests, they provided a wide range of responses. Their responses showed that they considered this method of control to be risky and contentious. Such contentious issues are an example of the…

The implementation of equity-oriented reforms is never simply a technical matter: it involves directly engaging with the norms and politics responsible for reproducing inequitable opportunities and outcomes, and with efforts to promote educational justice. To date, there has been little research on how leaders in science education navigate the…

Preservice secondary science teachers often experience science learning in narrow and marginalizing ways in their science preparation. These experiences cause harm, particularly for preservice teachers of color. They also limit the disciplinary resources they can develop for later teaching science in ways that value and sustain their students'…

In recent decades, great importance has been attached to teaching that promotes an active role of students in the learning process, and therefore the development of critical and divergent thinking in the teaching process. The aim of the research approach is to encourage students to independently investigate, discover, conclude and thus arrive at…

In recent years, there has been growing interest in exploring argumentation about socio-scientific issues (SSI) in the classroom to improve students' scientific literacy. Thus, this research aims to investigate how intervention based on argumentation about SSI affects secondary students' patterns of informal reasoning and reasoning quality. The…

How is knowledge pertaining to science best transferred to the public in order to bolster support for science-based policy and governance, thereby serving the common good? Herein lies a well-recognized challenge: widespread public support arguably requires a widespread understanding of science itself, but this is naturally undermined by the…

Applications of machine learning in chemistry are many and varied, from prediction of structure-property relationships, to modeling of potential energy surfaces for large scale atomistic simulations. We describe a generalized approach for the application of machine learning to the classification of spectra which can be used as the basis for a wide…

Shaping public research to enhance its societal contribution has become a key policy concern. Against this background, how research funding may stimulate the societal orientation of scientific research--or how funding is societally targeted--has been underexplored. This article proposes an exploratory approach to characterize societal targeting in…

Amid a broader sociopolitical milieu of division, disagreement, and uncivil debate, this study investigates instances of disagreement among students in a high school science classroom as they attempt to answer the civic question of "what should we do" about climate change, a long contentious topic in the USA. Using a theoretical…

Socio-scientific issues (SSI) are informed by science concepts but require consideration of societal aspects in order to be effectively understood and resolved. As a result, functional scientific literacy necessitates fluency with science as well as other domains of knowledge when engaged in reasoning about science and societal dimensions of SSI…

The aim of the current study was to explore science teachers' perceptions of the nature of technology through the use of Q methodology. 17 science teachers were sampled as participants, and to explore their perceptions of the nature of technology, they ranked a Q-sort of 36 statements that constituted the following six categories: (i) definition…

Computational models are employed to study and respond to pressing environmental issues such as groundwater contamination. This use of computational models, which often involves algorithms and uncertainty that are hidden to the public, has implications for environmental science literacy. This study applies a design-based research approach to…