The important role of self-efficacy (SE) in students' motivation, engagement, persistence, and academic achievements has been reconfirmed by ample research, both in general and for STEM disciplines. As most studies focused on traditional school systems, additional research is needed on how science SE develops in different educational environments,…

This article explores the meaning of community-driven and owned science in the context of an Inuit-led land-based program, the Young Hunters Program. It is the foundational program of the Arviat Aqqiumavvik Society, situated in Nunavut, Canada, a community-led group dedicated to researching challenges to community wellness and designing and…

This case study explores how a group of Grade 9 students engaged in sociopolitical discourses and actions in a science class in a mostly indigenous student school in Nepal. The study used sociopolitical consciousness (SPC) as a framework to document and understand indigenous students' SPC-oriented science interactions and subsequent social change…

This mixed-methods research investigated teachers' perceptions of intrinsic factors (personal attributes of the teacher) and extrinsic factors (environmental) influencing the implementation of inquiry-based science learning at township (underdeveloped urban area) high schools in South Africa. Quantitative data were collected by means of an adapted…

Tree thinking, the understanding of the evolutionary relationships between organisms depicted in different types of tree diagrams, is an integral part of understanding evolution. Novice learners often read tree diagrams differently from specialists, resulting in diverse interpretations of the relationships depicted. The aim of this study is to…

Scientific expertise and outcomes often give rise to controversy. An educational response that equips students to take part in socioscientific discussions is the teaching of Socially Acute Questions (SAQs). Students engaging with SAQs need to engage with socio scientific reasoning, which involves reasoning with evidence from a variety of fields…

Achievement goal theory distinguishes between mastery goals (the goals of developing competence) and performance goals (the goals of demonstrating competence) [Ames [1992] "Journal of Educational Psychology" 84: 261-271]. In this study, we employed this theory aiming to better understand why adolescents' motivation to learn science…

This study explores how often students are engaged in their science classes and their affective states during these times, using an innovative methodology that records these experiences "in situ". Sampling a subset of high schools in the U.S. and Finland, we collected over 7,000 momentary responses from 344 students over the course of a…

The purpose of this investigation was to examine, from a cross-cultural perspective, students' epistemological patterns of reasoning about socioscientific issues (SSI), and to identify potential interactions of cultural and scientific identity. Mediating factors associated with students' argumentation and discourse about SSI, as well as the…

The development of scientifically literate citizens remains an important priority of science education; however, growing evidence of students' disenchantment with school science continues to challenge the realization of this aim. This triangulation mixed methods study investigated the learning experiences of 152 9th grade students as they…

This is a mix methods follow-up study in which we reconfirm the findings from an earlier study [Vedder-Weiss & Fortus [2011] "Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 48(2)", 199-216]. The findings indicate that adolescents' declining motivation to learn science, which was found in many previous studies [Galton [2009] "Moving to…

While environmental argumentation has recently received much attention from science educators, little consideration has been given to how personal identities and social relationships can either support or constrain student argumentation. This study attends to this issue by examining environmental argumentation as a sociocultural activity (how…

This study aimed to assess grade 10 Turkish students' and science teachers' conceptions of nature of science (NOS) and whether these conceptions were related to selected variables. These variables included participants' gender, geographical region, and the socioeconomic status (SES) of their city and region; teacher disciplinary background, years…

The attitudes towards science of upper-primary students in three ability strands (average, above average, and gifted) were investigated. A total of 580 upper primary students from co-educational government and government-aided schools in Singapore were involved in this study. The attitude subscales investigated were enjoyment of science,…

Discussed is the influence of the nature of the environment on the culture of a people and students' concept attainment in science. The influence of the home environment, reasoning abilities, and preference in type of learning are included in the discussion. (KR)