A pilot study, funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, supported 10 secondary schools across England to plan and deliver open-ended investigative practical work within science curriculum time. This enabled all students to experience the benefits of investigative work, rather than just those attending extracurricular STEM enrichment activities.…

Creating critical mass has become a cornerstorne of science policy on both national and transnational levels. It suggests that once a certain size is reached, exponential growth or accelerated change will occur. In reconstructing theories, policies and practices associated with critical mass, the paper traces the image of critical mass as a size…

Public trust in science and expertise remains a contentious issue. When public trust is analysed, it often simplifies a complex process of information retrieval and interpretation. Questionnaire surveys help us make sense of differences among actors and countries, but they fail to provide a comprehensive analysis of the reasons that lead citizens…

The need for an effective communication between scientific research and society is widely known to the broadest scientific community, and the sad times we are living in make it even clearer. At the same time, the need of establishing long-term structural connections between the worlds of research and that of education and scientific communication…

Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) incorporate research opportunities into the existing curriculum often by providing alternatives or replacing the traditional cookbook-based laboratory courses. Over the past 50 years, CURE courses have been shown to benefit both students and faculty members alike. Despite the large number of…

This study reported the effects of a research-based laboratory module on students' scientific research, green chemistry, and research skills self-efficacy in a second-semester general chemistry laboratory course. The research-based laboratory module was designed based on the course-based research experience (CURE) model, which features materials…

The future outlook for STEM jobs in the U.S. is projected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to have a 10.5% increase from 2020 to 2030, with 11.3 million STEM jobs projected in the U.S. by 2030. During the same time interval the projected rate of increase of STEM jobs is higher (at 10.5%) compared to non-STEM jobs (at 7.5%). Engineering,…

Knowledge construction is an essential scientific practice, and undergraduate research experiences (UREs) provide opportunities for students to engage with this scientific practice in an authentic context. While participating in UREs, students develop conceptualizations about how science gathers, evaluates, and constructs knowledge (science…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the preferences of 96 educational researchers on the use of digital technologies in scientific research. Design/methodology/approach: The study was designed as a quantitative-dominant sequential explanatory mixed-method research. Findings: Despite the spreading use of advanced technologies of big data and…

This paper describes the "Explorers Virtual Internship" (EVI), which was designed and presented in the 2020-21 school year by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Despite our initial wariness about creating a virtual internship, the shift helped us make valuable innovations to our programming. EVI paired 11 high school interns…

Every branch of science needs visitors' attention during the poster presentation session at conferences, symposiums, seminars, etc. In particular, participants in the chemistry and biochemistry conference need more visual tools to explain their research work in detail. Presence of smartphones and the ability of 2D barcodes will allow chemical…

With the impulse to control and order the disorderly, the threads or tributaries of affect and emotion, which mimic the meanderings of the aquifer itself, are often oversimplified or ignored. These are not anomalies of citizen science (CS) but 'normal' and expected 'disconnects' that surface when working within a multidisciplinary environment. The…

Author-based metrics (ABMs) and journal-based metrics (JBMs), as well as citations, are the dominant currency of intellectual recognition in academia. These metrics and citations continue to be dominated by the Clarivate Analytics Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and are still widely used as a surrogate to determine prestige, scientific credit, and…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the change in the levels of self-efficacy for research and anxiety about research among prospective teachers participating in a course on research methodology in education. This study was structured with an exploratory sequential pattern, which is a mixed method. Seventy-four prospective teachers…

In this report we present a method to incorporate applied catalysis research into the multiyear educational undergraduate program of Chemical Engineering at the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences (UAS). In this way the total student population is introduced to research and thereby contributes to the scientific output of the department, and…