Using low-cost electronic components and building blocks, we have developed an effective teaching module where students design and test light-scattering, air-quality sensors to introduce them to chemical and environmental engineering research. This module has been successful in engaging the public, developing citizen scientists, and bridging gaps…

Despite efforts to increase teaching of biotechnology worldwide, there are concerns that public literacy of genetic technologies remains insufficient. Improved education strategies are expected to empower individuals to make informed decisions about biotechnology. To evaluate the teaching and learning of this complex topic, qualitative assessment…

The American Psychological Association (APA) has called for psychologists to become more involved in addressing climate change. One way to address this pressing issue is through curriculum. To this end, we describe an undergraduate course that we created and teach exclusively focused on the interface of psychology and global climate change. The…

Preparing students to achieve the lofty goal of functional scientific literacy entails addressing the normative and non-normative facets of socioscientific issues (SSI) such as scientific processes, the nature of science (NOS) and diverse sociocultural perspectives. SSI instructional approaches have demonstrated some efficacy for promoting…

As every elementary science teacher knows, children sometimes ask questions that can not easily be answered by science. The "messiness" of these questions may stem from the fact that scientific understanding is often incomplete and ever changing, a situation that can lead students (and the public) to be confused about the information…

The paper examines the introduction of the so-called professor's privilege in Sweden in the 1940s and shows how this legal principle for university patents emerged out of reforms of techno-science and the patent law around World War II. These political processes prompted questions concerning the nature and functions of university research: How is…

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Education supports an informed society that uses NOAA-related sciences to make the best social, economic, and environmental decisions. The "FY2018-2019 NOAA Education Implementation Plan" is a companion to the "Education Strategic Plan 2015-2035: Advancing NOAA's Mission through…

As part of a revision to the content and delivery of first-year chemistry instruction at the University of British Columbia's Okanagan campus, we have employed the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) as a thematic framework. This framework was introduced to promote the achievement of affective learning outcomes, including a…

Sustainability is a complex, ill-defined concept that has been the subject of much debate over the last two decades (Wals and Jickling, 2002). The ill-defined nature of sustainability manifests itself within socio-scientific issues where conflicting reality constructions, values, norms, and interests interact. Initial teacher education as part of…

Socioscientific issues (SSIs) are used to guide science instruction by presenting scientific real-world problems as multifaceted, consisting of social as well as scientific components that must be considered when constructing solutions to the issues. Using SSIs in classrooms can support students in developing scientific literacy by enhancing their…

Functional scientific literacy demands an informed citizenry capable of negotiating controversial socioscientific issues (SSI). Perspective taking is critical to SSI implementation as it enables understanding of the diverse cognitive and emotional perspectives of others. Science teacher educators must therefore facilitate teachers' promotion of…

There is not a common attitude in a society for socio-scientific issues (SSI) such as whether to use nuclear power plants for energy production. Within this respect, the aim of the research is to examine pre-service science teachers' and pre-service social studies teachers' attitudes toward SSI and to reveal their views about setting up nuclear…

A goal of undergraduate geoscience programs is to prepare students for the geoscience workforce. In order to understand the extent to which programs succeed at this goal, we identified desired workforce skills, compiled undergraduate geoscience program requirements, and mapped workforce skills onto faculty responses to the 2016 National Geoscience…

Mapping India's vast, complex, and unruly education system through the systematic generation of accurate and current data, and encouraging accountability by persuading a diverse array of actors to engage with such data, is an ambitious, if not heroic, project. Yet this is what India's Education Information Management System (EMIS), the Unified…

This paper reports about the effect of an innovative, context-based science teaching and learning program on student intrinsic motivation. The intervention aimed at promoting Inquiry-Based Science Education (IBSE) in close collaboration with teachers throughout the academic year by developing and implementing socio-scientific, context-based,…