ABSTRACT Scientists agree that learning to cope with failures is an important skill for science students to develop, and students who participate in science research often have positive outcomes after coping with science failures. However, the experience of failure in undergraduate science education more broadly seems to have an overall negative impact on students, particularly those who hold minoritized identities in STEM settings. Past work centering on failure has rarely directly addressed the role that students’ identities play in shaping students’ coping and outcomes of STEM failure experiences. This leaves the following question unanswered: How do students see their identities as informing their perception of failure in science settings? We asked undergraduate science students enrolled in course‐based undergraduate research experiences to reflect on the relationship between their identities and their view or experience of failure within the course. Guided by hermeneutic phenomenology principles in research design, we used intersectionality theory and phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory in concert to collect and thematically analyze student survey responses. From this, we distilled five novel themes that add to prior work. These themes share how students see their identities as vulnerabilities in encountering failure as well as strengths. Notably, students holding identities that can remain undisclosed recognize the privilege they have in navigating failure, above and beyond those who hold visible minoritized identities.
ABSTRACT In this article, I examine group science talk within the classrooms of three urban secondary science teachers who regularly use one‐to‐one computers to mediate their NGSS‐aligned science instruction. I combine methods of framing analysis (Goffman 1974; Tannen 1993) and interaction analysis (Jordan and Henderson 1995) to illustrate differences in how students talk and relate across clips where computers were differentially present as mediators of group activity. In doing so, I compare how students interacted with one another and framed their contributions to the group when individualized computers mediated their activity to when computers were shared, limited or absent. My findings demonstrate how students embody certain habits as they each work on their own individual digital device—namely, going at their own pace, and keeping their screens private—which appeared to stymie students’ ability to engage in sensemaking talk as a social group. These inhibiting forms of social interaction were mitigated in clips where students were asked to share computers or documents or even put computers away altogether. This article contributes to our evolving understandings of how the expansion of individualized computers and digital platforms may be shaping the kind of environment classrooms are for science discourse. As I conclude, I call for educators and researchers who are working towards the science education community's long held reform goals of collective knowledge construction in classrooms to consider how we might disrupt the individualizing ways students have come to use computers in school.
As youth and teachers engage in modeling conversations, they are simultaneously negotiating how knowledge is generated and how people are accountable to each other in a community. Typically, design and analysis have privileged the epistemic focus, focusing on how to support young people to take up specific knowledge construction purposes and processes. The relational aspects of modeling conversations have received less attention. In this paper, we explore epistemic and relational work as intertwined during classroom modeling conversations. We examine the experience of three teachers who considered the relational dimensions of modeling conversations to be deeply connected with epistemic dimensions. We explore the tensions that they experienced in relation to students evaluating each other's ideas and student participation in whole-class modeling conversations. We use framing as an analytic lens to understand the roles, goals, and actions that teachers sought and that students took up in these conversations. Finally, we show how as teachers tried out alternative strategies and structures for classroom conversations, these afforded different epistemic and relational opportunities for teachers and students.
ABSTRACT Trans, nonbinary, and intersex persons are—and have always been—an integral part of humankind. However, these communities are under attack. We live in a time of growing state repression and the normalization of political violence against trans, nonbinary, and intersex persons throughout much of the world, and we have a responsibility to understand these conditions and consider their implications for science education. In this commentary, we briefly outline the growing state repression of trans, nonbinary, and intersex persons, illustrating this repression with examples primarily drawn from the U.S. context, while acknowledging similar forms of repression happening in many countries. We discuss the ways that scientific discourses and ideologies are being co‐opted to rationalize these attacks, explain the responsibility this creates for science educators, and examine the important work that has already been done to understand and dismantle oppression and to celebrate the lives and accomplishments of these communities within and beyond science education. Finally, we offer recommendations for specific actions that science educators and researchers can take to uphold the human rights of trans, nonbinary, and intersex persons and communities.
Educating youth about environmental and climate justice is crucial in realizing a sustainable and flourishing future. Yet this can be challenging given the intense eco-emotions youth experience and express while learning about these consequential realities and their implications. However, strong emotions are not to be ignored, feared, or controlled, as they play a powerful role in science learning. To explore how emotions support deep sensemaking, I centered Latina Eco-feminist and Anti-colonial perspectives and the concept of "Sentipensar" [feel-thinking], examining the eco-emotional responses of a single youth participant, Idra. By using Sentipensar as an analytical tool, I was able to recognize how Idra made sense of the environmental injustices she encountered while participating in a science education program studying marine plastic pollution in Baja California, Mexico. Her story revealed that she practiced Sentipensar as a critical pedagogy to (1) foster honest and communal sensemaking, (2) clarify and deepen existing understandings, (3) defend herself and her future, and (4) cultivate science identities and just worldbuilding. The findings advocate for a departure from dominant logics that divorce reason from emotion and suggest that nurturing Sentipensar can cultivate the relational and axio-epistemological shifts needed in science teaching and learning.
ABSTRACT In this commentary, we respond to the persistent deficit framing of queer and trans life in science education research and call for a reorientation of queer‐ and trans‐inclusive scholarship towards more joyful commitments. We trace the “joy deficit” in scholarship on gender and sexual diversity in science education through Wright and Delgado's (2023) three paradigms —safety, equity, and critical—and examine both their contributions and their limits for research and pedagogy. While each has contributed to important progress, they continue to position queer and trans people through deficit framings and constrained subjectivities. In response, we draw attention to a growing body of anti‐deficit work emerging within a relational paradigm, which recognizes queer and trans cultural praxis as onto‐epistemological, methodological, and pedagogical forces that sustain and create joy and possibility within science education. We outline how these works reframe research by centering relationality and collective care as constitutive of science learning, and we invite scholars to take up these commitments in building more just and life‐affirming science education futures.
ABSTRACT This systematic literature review examines intervention studies focused on teaching science to a diverse range of learners. It adopts a broad definition of inclusion and makes use of the PRISMA statement. The review aims to provide an overview of evidence‐based teaching approaches in the current literature, identify the science skills targeted, and synthesize the evidence for the approaches used in inclusive and separate settings in the context of science for all . The review analyzed intervention studies published between 2013 and 2022. Only quantitative, methodologically sound intervention studies were included ( N = 31). The findings revealed that almost all identified studies adopted a narrow definition of inclusion. The six identified teaching approaches include digital learning ( n = 14), peer support ( n = 2), self‐directed learning ( n = 9), design‐based engineering learning ( n = 2), systematic instruction ( n = 16), and universal design for learning ( n = 3). Positive evidence was found for systematic instruction, mixed evidence for digital learning and self‐directed learning, and insufficient but promising evidence for peer support, design‐based engineering learning, and universal design for learning. Furthermore, the results suggest that studies in the context of doing science, learning about science , and learning to address socioscientific issues are lacking, and further research is required.
In a complex, interconnected world in which socio-scientific problems such as climate change, vaccination, and genetic testing are emerging alongside political polarization and fake news, it is crucial to teach younger generations to critically understand science, imagine possible solutions, and adopt positions that consider different identities and worldviews. To accomplish this, the long tradition of dialogic teaching could be a crucial pedagogical approach. However, despite efforts to promote dialogic teaching, transferring these pedagogies to classrooms has proven difficult, especially in underserved schools. In these contexts, pedagogical innovations are even more challenging, often reinforcing traditional teaching or the belief that dialogic pedagogies are only for upper/middle-class students. Added to this, narratives of dialogic teaching experiences from the Global South are still scarce. This single case study illustrates in-depth the process of enacting a South American dialogic design--deliberative teaching--in an underserved science class in Chile. With a mixed design focused on a qualitative narrative of the experience, it addresses the relationship between teacher and researcher, who collaborate on a project of deliberative pedagogy in an 11th-grade science class. Codification of peer interaction data is presented to complement the case narrative. The study illustrates the complexities of implementing dialogic pedagogies in challenging contexts, and how relationships of collaboration, dialogue, trust, and flexibility were needed to address the pedagogical innovation. It emphasizes that, with enough support, peer dialogue, motivation, and engagement can flourish.
College science exams are an important and widespread marker for student progress toward technical careers. Predominantly enacted using traditional teaching practices, exams also represent an opportunity for significant improvement in higher education. To explore the potential benefits of a particular style of exam assessment known as exam preview methods, a mixed-methods experimental design was enacted in science classrooms across fields and with five faculty instructors at community colleges in the United States. Parallel sections were randomly assigned to be assessed with exams either in the faculty's traditional method or with exam preview methods, and data (primarily coded interviews and learning gains) were analyzed for the impacts of implementation. Students in sections using exam preview methods were observed to have better student experiences, more demonstrated learning, and better conditions for effective learning in the class as a whole. The results together suggest important benefits for students in exam preview sections when triangulated between different types of data. When weighed against a modest observed time cost for implementation of the new method, these data suggest that exam preview methods may be a straightforward and useful innovation for a range of science classrooms.
Students should have opportunities to shape scientific knowledge building-both to make science more engaging and meaningful to them, and so they can learn to decide how and why to engage in scientific practices. Yet, it has been rare, even at the college level, for students to define and pursue their own scientific investigations. One challenge stems from a perceived trade-off between allowing students to define their own paths of investigation and a desire for college students to engage with complex, disciplinarily meaningful ideas. In this paper, we address that tension by illustrating how students' epistemic agency emerged and led to meaningful scientific work. We describe the design of a 3-week unit within a large-enrollment introductory laboratory for college students that featured a system of interlocking models: a wet lab experimental model system and a computational model. We found that this design supported students in constructing and refining investigative aims that emerged from problems or contradictions they encountered at the intersection of the model systems. We also found that students were able to use each model system as an arena for making and enacting their own decisions about how to move their investigations forward. Ultimately, both identifying and shaping their own aims and making their own methodological choices contributed to students' sense of their scientific modeling work as meaningful.
Effective collaboration among people with multiple expertise and perspectives is essential as real-world problems become increasingly complex and interdisciplinary. STEM inquiry centers on student teamwork to address cross-disciplinary and open-ended real-world problems. It could provide a promising platform for cultivating students' collaborative skills. Although several studies have demonstrated the reciprocity between STEM inquiry and collaborative skills, more constructive insights on ways to facilitate effective collaboration among students, especially regarding its social dimensions, are needed. Specifically, this study adopted an instrumental case study approach to track the collaboration dynamics of three Grade 9 students during a 1-day STEM hackathon. Drawing on symbolic interactionism as the theoretical framework and integrating Foucault's power/knowledge lens, this study provides nuanced insights into the complexities of students' collaborative interactions shaped by multiple subtle social factors. The research findings revealed four emergent themes during STEM inquiry processes: (a) the power relations between the leader and team members might perturb their social interactions when task structures were designed as student-centered collaborative STEM problem-solving; (b) task and relationship conflicts would arise in specific disciplinary areas when students identified as experts tend to dominate inquiry spaces; (c) deteriorated relationships resulted from being positioned as delegitimized members by peers; and (d) territorial task division hindered excluded members' willingness to engage. These findings can provide informed insights to educators about designing STEM curricula with social affordances and supporting students' social interactions that facilitate effective collaboration.
This study examines how integrating sustainability through socio-scientific issue (SSI) in secondary chemistry teaching shapes epistemic openness and closure from a decolonial perspective, as mediated through classroom discourse. Drawing on a co-planned lesson on copper mining in Chile - a scientifically rich yet ethically and politically charged context - I analyse how pedagogical decisions positioned chemistry either as an apolitical framing (Gandolfi 2025b) or as a practice entangled with extractivism, environmental injustice, and responsibility. Using reflexive thematic analysis of lesson audio recordings, student artefacts, and researcher fieldnotes, and interpreting classroom interaction through Mortimer and Scott's (2003) communicative approaches and Gandolfi's (2025a) decolonial framework, I identify three key pedagogical moments across the lesson. Findings show that dialogic discourse initially opened space for students' ethical concerns but remained limited without follow-up that foregrounded structural causes of harm. A subsequent authoritative focus consolidated disciplinary understanding while producing epistemic closure. Epistemic openness was later re-activated when chemical evidence was reconnected to sustainability and enacted materially through waste-management deliberations. Findings suggest that decolonial perspectives in chemistry education can move teaching beyond content delivery toward pedagogies that centre justice, epistemic plurality, and critical engagement with real-world challenges, while remaining contingent on communicative shifts and deliberate pedagogical mediation.
To participate effectively in modern society, it is essential to have both knowledge of scientific concepts and an understanding of scientific practices. Children develop initial knowledge and skills to engage in scientific practices, such as identifying patterns, long before entering school. It can be assumed that instructional support of scientific practices fosters children's understanding of these practices. However, little is known about how scientific practices are implemented and supported in early childhood education and care. Therefore, this study explores which scientific practices preschool teachers initiate in early science activities, and how they support children's understanding of these practices. Further, we analyze whether these practices are combined within a Scientific Inquiry Cycle. To this end, 116 videos of science activities in which German preschool teachers interact with two to eight children (M = 4.57 years, SD = 0.64) were analyzed using a developed coding manual. The analysis revealed that, in most of the recorded science activities, children had multiple opportunities to engage in scientific practices (e.g., observing, predicting). These practices were frequently integrated into a simple inquiry cycle, typically consisting of prediction, testing, and interpretation. Investigations that lacked an underlying question, prediction, or interpretation, were rare. However, as preschool teachers did not provide instructional support that encouraged reflection on the meaning and purpose of scientific practices, this finding points to an opportunity to further promote children's understanding of these practices as they are a fundamental component of scientific literacy. Emphasizing procedural and epistemic knowledge in professional development can help preschool teachers more effectively support such inquiry processes in everyday activities. Building on teachers' implementation of scientific practices, the coding manual from this study offers concrete examples to foster children's engagement in and understanding of these practices.
Research on resilience over the past decades has been seeking to understand how some students manage to overcome the odds associated with exposure to adversities. Within this research field, the concept of resilience has been extensively examined, with "academic resilience" has been widely used in education to describe resilience in relation to learning and cognitive performance. At the same time, science education research has long focused on understanding and counteracting educational inequalities affecting minoritised students and has generated insights into how some students persists and succeed despite structural and social challenges. However, these issues have rarely been explicitly examined through the lens of academic resilience. This review paper therefore examines how academic resilience has been conceptualised and mobilised within science education research, and considers what a resilience framework contributes to understanding how students navigate structural barriers in learning science. Through a review of thirteen science education journals, the analysis identifies four overarching themes in the limited but emerging use of academic resilience in the field, as well as a range of resources that support students' engagement and educational trajectories within context shaped by structural constraints. These resources are discussed in relation to how academic resilience has been operationalised within science education research, advancing a conceptualisation of academic resilience that could be potentially brings greater analytical coherence to existing research on the phenomena of "succeeding against the odds" in science education.
This study aimed to examine teachers’ dialogic discussions in applications of concept cartoons on socioscientific issues (SSICCs) and how these discussions developed high school gifted students’ decision-making competences and informal reasoning modes. Through multiple case design, this study viewed three teachers in Science and Art Center (SAC) as the cases. The teachers’ dialogic discussions were analyzed by using the Dialogic Inquiry Tool (DIT). The findings of multiple case analysis revealed that the teachers’ dialogic discussions ranged from the lowest dialogic level to weak level in the first weeks. Toward the end of the implementations, they demonstrated strong semi-dialogic level discussions. Likewise, high school gifted students evolved their decision-making competences from spontaneous decision-making level to the intermediate level of metareflection over time. This suggests that the teachers’ pedagogical improvements in dialogic discussions via SSICCs have positively impacted high school gifted students’ decision-making competences and informal reasoning modes. It can be concluded that an improvement in the teachers’ dialogic discussions via SSICCs has stimulated the students’ decision-making processes, which cover the use of the scientific evidence and multiple disciplines to form their informal reasoning modes. Thus, it is suggested that professional development programs should be developed and implemented to cultivate in-service teachers’ pedagogical competences at blending well-known educative tools (e.g., concept cartoons) with contemporary pedagogical strategies (e.g., dialogic discussion).
Understanding the ways in which curriculum standards represent the nature of science (NOS) is crucial for scientific literacy, especially as global education grapples with the integration of artificial intelligence. In this study, a detailed comparative analysis of the NOS content in the 2011 and 2022 versions of the Compulsory Education Chemistry Curriculum Standards (CECCS) in China was conducted. By employing the family resemblance approach framework, the curriculum content was systematically coded, and key changes and improvements in the latest curriculum were identified through descriptive statistical analysis and epistemic network analysis. The findings reflect the evolution of educational focus in China. Compared with CECCS (2011), CECCS (2022) not only expanded the range of NOS subcategories covered but also deepened the interconnections among these subcategories, particularly achieving significant progress in the integration of the cognitive–epistemic system and overall NOS. Despite these improvements, there remains a need for further enhancement in the social–institutional system, especially in the subcategories of professional activities and financial systems. These findings underscore the shift in China’s compulsory education chemistry curriculum reform toward a more integrated and comprehensive approach, one that increasingly aligns with global trends and offers critical implications for educational practice, policy and curriculum development, and future research.
Over the past decades, science education research has extensively examined the role of metaphors in teaching and learning science. However, much of the existing research has focused on verbal manifestations of metaphors, thereby overlooking aspects of metaphors that may occur in non-verbal form. This study reconceptualises metaphors as dynamic performances rather than mere verbal expressions by integrating perspectives from embodied cognition, enactivism, and the social semiotic theory of multimodality. We conducted a systematic metaphor analysis coupled with a multimodal interaction analysis of video data collected from five science teachers over 16 science lessons in five lower-secondary schools in Norway. Our findings show that the teachers routinely employed metaphors when introducing abstract concepts and explaining complex processes. These metaphors were often expressed multimodally through speech, gesture, and material objects. We identified five distinct patterns in teachers' metaphorical performances: (1) layering and integration of multiple modes to create rich metaphorical ensembles; (2) using gestures to scale scientific phenomena to human experience; (3) enacting dynamic processes through embodied modes; (4) maintaining metaphoricity through modal anchors; and (5) orchestrating progression from embodied representations to abstract scientific concepts. Additionally, we identified specific functions that different modes serve in the enactment and communication of metaphorical meaning, extending our understanding of multimodal meaning-making in science education. These findings demonstrate that metaphors function both as figures of thought and figures of action in science classrooms. Finally, the patterns shed light on teachers' tacit expertise in multimodal metaphorical communication and offer a framework for fostering reflective awareness in teacher education.
Nearly 50 million public school students in the United States are required to learn the content prescribed by state-mandated science standards. Although much is known about the implementation of science standards and teachers' perceptions of them, the development process of these standards remains unclear. Understanding standards development is crucial to ensure the process employed is thoughtful, fair, considers expertise, and results in standards of sufficient quality to warrant implementation. This study examined the development of science standards in Texas to determine the enacted process, the expertise involved, who held decision-making authority, and how authority was exercised. State Board of Education meetings were transcribed, coded, and supplemented with online documents and public records requests. Experts on learning were not present, and expertise in physics, earth science, and chemistry was weak to non-existent. Teachers played a role in the early stages of the process, but the board ultimately had the authority to override, modify, and write the final standards document. The board was observed adding developmentally inappropriate content, overriding teachers' and subject-matter experts' concerns, and using humor about their lack of subject-matter knowledge. The findings raise important concerns about placing responsibility for standards development on an elected board of public officials, given their limited time, expertise, and connections to special interest groups. Given the immense influence of standards on what students are taught, we recommend an independent standards development process that balances decision-making authority across experts in teaching, learning, the subject matter, and the milieu.
