Socio-scientific reasoning (SSR) is key to helping students take informed positions around socio-scientific issues (SSI). SSR comprises four competencies: recognising complexity of SSI's, multiple perspectives around SSI's, the need for ongoing inquiry around SSI's, and skepticism around different parties' claims made about SSI's. The Quantitative…

In this study, the relationship among the group creativity, empathy, and scientific inquiry ability of elementary school students were investigated. For this purpose, average scores and standard deviations of the group creativity problem solving, empathy, and scientific inquiry ability inventory were calculated and their correlation was analysed…

Perspective taking has been identified as a critical skill in the development of scientifically literate citizenry. Despite the importance of the construct, operationalising and identifying effective pedagogical strategies to promote effective perspective taking have proven challenging. This study provides empirical evidence to support the…

The current K-12 educational system often does not engage students in interdisciplinary learning. To address this need, we developed an integrated STEM + L (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and Digital Literacies) afterschool programme in which middle school students took discipline-specific roles (writer, scientist, artist, and engineer)…

This study aims to test the effectiveness of a socio-scientific issue (SSI) based instruction through STEM-6E (engage, explore, explain, engineer, enrich, and evaluate). Controversial science topics (e.g. genetically modified organisms) in many countries, especially Indonesia, can be approached via integrated STEM education. One hundred and nine…

Conventional school science has often portrayed obesity as a self-inflicted problem. It tends to ignore perspectives at the systems level, such as social, political, marketing and economic factors that shape an obesogenic environment that determines individual eating and lifestyle patterns. Therefore, socioscientific decisions (e.g. fat tax) are…

This paper describes analysis of teaching instances that are part of an in-service preschool teachers programme about chemistry and physics in preschool. The aim is to develop knowledge about the communication established between teacher and children in relation to an object of learning, specifically the role of intersubjective communication in…

This study investigates the role of perspective-taking skills in how children explain spatially complex astronomical phenomena. Explaining many astronomical phenomena, especially those studied in elementary and middle school, requires shifting between an Earth-based description of the phenomena and a space-based reference frame. We studied 7- to…

The following study investigates the range of strategies individuals develop to infer and interpret cross-sections of three-dimensional objects. We focus on the identification of mental representations and problem-solving processes made by 11 individuals with the goal of building training applications that integrate the strategies developed by the…

This article reports from an empirical study on the affordances and constraints for using staged socio-political debates for authentic summative assessment of scientific literacy. The article focuses on conditions for student participation and what purposes emerge in student interaction in a socio-political debate. As part of the research project,…

Research shows that scientific knowledge develops through a process of decision-making as well as discovery, and that argumentation is a genre of discourse crucial to the practice of science. Students should therefore be supported in understanding the scientific practices of dialectical and rhetorical argumentation as part of learning about…

Discusses how conceptual change has developed over the past three decades, alternative approaches for analyzing it, multiperspective views of science learning and instruction, how conceptual change can be used to examine scientific literacy, and paths to a powerful framework for improving science teaching and learning. (Contains 91 references.)…