The federal government and a number of nonprofit, non-governmental agencies have invested heavily in programs designed to provide research opportunities, financial support, and mentorship to undergraduates in science-related fields. These efforts are aimed at supporting students' matriculation in science majors and into science-related careers.…

Project Lead the Way (PLTW) is an applied STEM program first introduced nearly three decades ago to enhance the STEM content of Career Technical Education (CTE). Currently, more than 12,000 US high schools offer the program. Using data from three cohorts of public high school freshmen in Missouri, we investigate the impact of PLTW program offer…

Physicists, physics students, and community members engage with each other through a variety of informal physics programs. These programs differ in format, such as after school programs, public lectures, planetariums, summer camps, and other non-formal classroom environments. These programs also differ in the physics topics they cover, activities,…

This study focuses on educational attainment in New Zealand's undergraduate programmes in medicine and science (N = 750 and N = 4722, respectively), by following four student cohorts over the course of their degree. This research aimed to identify the extent to which studying in competitive academic programmes (Medicine and BSc) attenuate…

This article explores the perception of gender inequality in science and the influencing factors. Data was collected through in-depth interviews with students belonging to a science club; we present it as a case study. This research sheds light on what high school and university students studying Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics…

Creative ways of delivering informal science events in community settings are viewed as key to engaging new audiences and participants whom scientists find hard to reach, however, the impact of 'formal' setting events is often overlooked. Here, through a mixed-methods approach, we analyse a large-scale family-focused public engagement event hosted…

The nature of science (NOS) has been recognised as an essential component for engagement with socioscientific issues (SSI). However, the findings on the link between the two have been inconclusive. This calls for a shift from students merely knowing about NOS, to using their understanding of it as a tool for decision-making and participation in…

Core concepts provide a framework for organizing facts and understanding in neuroscience higher education curricula. Core concepts are overarching principles that identify patterns in neuroscience processes and phenomena and can be used as a foundational scaffold for neuroscience knowledge. The need for community-derived core concepts is pressing,…

This paper focuses on finding the criteria adopted by users to select free information retrieved from the Web for academic use. A close-ended questionnaire was formulated to record the opinions of the respondents. A survey for various categories of users such as post graduate students, research scholars and faculty members from five universities…

Educational games are fun teaching tools prepared in line with the aims of the lessons and facilitate the understanding of the subjects. Due to these features, they can be used in science centers to both discover exhibits and provide understanding of concepts. In this study, it was aimed to determine the opinions about the educational games…

Although advising relationships are key for doctoral student success, little research has addressed how they form. Understanding the formation of advising relationships can help contextualize their later development and ultimately support a student's decision to persist in the doctorate. To understand relationship formation, the purpose of this…

This study presents a conceptual framework for embedding interdisciplinary learning approaches in a postsecondary science program in order to foster interdisciplinary science habits in students. The framework was developed through the lens of a multi-year interdisciplinary postsecondary science program that encompasses a series of courses in which…

The Integrated Concentration in Science (iCons) 4-year program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst was designed to promote interdisciplinary STEM collaboration in the solution of real-world problems and encourage student independence and interdependence through a student-centered teaching approach that structures all projects as group…

Science mentoring programs are powerful opportunities for youth to develop conceptual knowledge, undertake authentic practices, and have impacts on their science-related identity work. Here, we use design-based research to understand how a university-community partnership expanded upon traditional mentoring structures to facilitate…

Informal physics programs bring physicists together with youth and adults from local communities to engage with physics content outside of classroom settings. These public engagement or "physics outreach" programs are a significant endeavor of the physics community; however, we lack a systemic documentation of these efforts, which makes…