The rapid spread of socioscientific issues (SSI) misinformation and disinformation threatens civic engagement, poses serious environmental and public health risks, and undermines educational efforts toward scientific literacy. This is concerning for college students, who are potentially at risk for belief in science mis/disinformation, considering their consistent use of social media. Science education must understand how factors such as sociocultural background, knowledge of science, and emotions impact students’ engagement with mis/disinformation. This mixed-methods study investigated the factors associated with postsecondary non-science major students’ evaluations of mis/disinformation in the context of three SSI and their justifications of those evaluations. Data collected included students’ demographics, mis/disinformation credibility perceptions, negative emotional response to mis/disinformation, and NOS and mis/disinformation views. Findings indicate that distinct factors such as political orientation played a crucial role, with more liberal students generally exhibiting greater distrust and negative perceptions toward misinformation vignettes compared to their conservative counterparts. Negative emotional response to the mis/disinformation vignettes, particularly the fracking and climate change vignettes, associated with students perceiving those vignettes as less credible. Additionally, students with more sophisticated views on the nature of science (NOS) and mis/disinformation tended to rate certain vignettes as less credible and expressed more skepticism. However, these associations varied between SSI contexts and students’ evaluation criteria (e.g., examining evidence, presence of expertise) through justification were applied variably and sometimes in opposing ways. This study offers novel empirical insight on how the complex interplay of political ideology, emotions, and NOS views differ across SSI contexts when people engage with mis/disinformation. Our results demonstrate the need for teachers to help students develop a “toolbox” of mis/disinformation evaluation strategies to be able to effectively and cognitively confront variable contexts.
This study examines the changes in K–11 STEM education policy in Russia between 2012 and 2024, revealing whether and how geopolitical positioning shapes educational priorities during periods of significant ideological transformation. Using the cosmopolitan nationalism theoretical framework, we analyze how Russia navigates the inherent tension between global scientific engagement and nationalist educational objectives within STEM curricula. Through mixed methods combining qualitative and quantitative content analysis of policy documents, quantitative content analysis of curricular materials, and analysis of interviews with experts, we identify three distinct phases in Russia’s STEM education trajectory. Our findings reveal a strategic duality, whereby STEM disciplines function as “cosmopolitan islands” within an increasingly nationalized educational landscape. Despite Russia’s explicit turn toward technological and educational sovereignty, we show that STEM curricula maintain substantial alignment with international scientific standards while embedding content within nationalist framing. The study contributes to understanding how educational systems in non-democratic contexts balance globally oriented technological advancement imperatives with nationalist identity formation. It refines the cosmopolitan nationalism framework by demonstrating how different disciplinary domains within a single educational system can occupy distinct positions along the cosmopolitan–nationalist spectrum, offering insights into potential pathways for maintaining dialogue during periods of geopolitical tension.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has attracted growing attention in science and education, yet the affective register through which scientific concepts, judgements, and norms are handled when AI becomes part of ordinary scientific work has received less examination. Rather than treating AI as an external force acting upon science, this paper attends to how scientists’ hesitation, vigilance, and quiet recalibration make the grammar of scientific practice publicly available, particularly where established ways of going on no longer run automatically. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, we set out a methodological orientation that approaches scientific literature as a series of reading encounters in which argument, style, hesitation, and affect render the criteria of scientific practice perceptible. What follows are three sets of reading encounters of scientists’ commentaries in Nature and Science. The first stays with AI in science as an enterprise, where AI is folded into routine descriptions of method. The second turns to medical science, where judgement, trust, and responsibility become especially pressing under AI-mediated conditions. The third takes up science, art, and creativity, not as evidence of disciplinary rupture but as occasions in which the boundaries of scientific practice are tested and repaired in use. Across these encounters, affective signals are not incidental to analysis but conditions of noticing that anything has shifted at all. The final section considers what the reading encounters could mean for science education: shifting attention away from evaluating AI as beneficial or harmful to cultivating affectively attuned judgement and the capacity to go on responsibly within evolving scientific practices.
The nature of science (NOS) has become a shared objective of science education, and textbooks are largely influencing teachers’ and students’ understanding of NOS. The study analyzes six editions of junior high school chemistry textbooks published in different years since China’s reform and opening-up, with a focus on the changes of NOS representations. Adopting content analysis method, the study analyzes the representation of NOS aspects, the approaches for representing NOS, and the form in the textbooks, based on the analytical framework constructed to be appropriate for NOS representation in chemistry textbooks from China. The results reveal an increasing number and frequency of NOS aspects. However, the representation of NOS aspects in all analyzed textbooks is imbalanced, while there is considerable emphasis on the scientific process from the broad sense and the empirical aspect from the narrow sense, the aspects of theory-driven, theories and laws, interdisciplinary nature of science and scientific spirit are neglected. Regarding the approaches for representing NOS, the explicit approach in textbooks has not been emphasized for a long time, and the contextualized-implicit approach is mainly emphasized. Regarding the form, the science history explanation, text examples, and brain provoking studies have also been gradually changed from thinness to thickness in quantity. Therefore, the representation of NOS in junior high school chemistry textbooks has changed positively for a long time, but it still requires further attention from curriculum designers and writers over the forty-year reform.
Recent educational trends highlight the need to develop multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary competencies among science teachers to foster innovation in secondary education. However, the debate on which interdisciplinary competences are most relevant—and still lacking—in teacher education remains open, and little is known about how teachers with strong disciplinary backgrounds experience encounters with interdisciplinary forms of knowledge organisation. This study proposes a theoretical approach to interdisciplinarity that informed both the design of pre-service teacher education modules and the analysis of how pre-service teachers positioned themselves in relation to its main challenges. Specifically, Akkerman and Bakker’s (2011) boundary framework was adapted to the context of interdisciplinary teacher education. The framework was implemented in two modules addressing different forms of interdisciplinarity: one on a curricular theme (parabola and parabolic motion) and one on an emergent STEM topic (nanotechnology). Data collected within a European project were analysed through a theoretically oriented thematic analysis grounded in the boundary framework. Across both modules, pre-service teachers displayed a range of reactions—from deep engagement to discomfort that led them to adopt small strategies for restoring epistemic comfort. This discomfort stemmed less from boundaries themselves than from the ambiguity of boundary objects, which challenged their sense of disciplinary security. Multi- and trans-disciplinarity were therefore perceived as more manageable than full interdisciplinarity. Yet these moments of uncertainty also sparked meta-disciplinary reflection on the nature and interrelation of disciplinary knowledge.
Amid growing scientific, technological, and social challenges, socioscientific issues (SSI) are widely recognized as important in promoting students’ scientific literacy and decision-making. However, empirical research on Chinese middle school students’ experiences with SSI remains limited, particularly concerning regional and gender differences. This study employed a cross-sectional survey design with 908 middle school students from provinces with high, medium, and low levels of economic development. Two-way repeated-measures ANOVAs and a two-way MANOVA were employed to examine the main and interaction effects of province and gender on students’ SSI knowledge access, discussion contexts, and attitudes. The results showed that students’ overall experiences with SSI were relatively limited. Social networking sites (SNS) were the most frequently reported source of SSI information and the most common context for discussion, whereas school-based SSI experiences remained limited. Clear regional disparities were observed, with students from high-GDP provinces reporting more frequent SSI-related experiences and generally more positive attitudes, although collective efficacy was comparatively lower. Gender differences were minimal, with female students showing slightly higher participation in SNS-based discussions and classroom activities. These findings underscore the urgency of integrating SSI into science education, in line with the updated 2022 Curriculum Standards in China. Future research should further investigate the factors underlying variations in students’ SSI-related experiences.
This study investigates the concept of theory, a notion central to understanding the nature and structure of scientific knowledge. In school science, theory is often introduced simply as the counterpart of experiment—its explanatory partner—and is used to account for laws, models, and problem-solving procedures. Yet the concept itself frequently lacks a clearly articulated identity, internal structure, or hierarchy of components. In contrast, the philosophy of science treats fundamental theories as the constitutive elements from which scientific knowledge is built. This role becomes especially salient when scientific disciplines are examined holistically, as in the development of modern physics alongside classical physics. By tracing the origins of scientific theory, we arrive at a definition aligned with the constitutional view of science as “the theory of the real.” This perspective supports a refined account of theory and motivates revisions to the commonly cited characteristics of science. We argue that the Discipline–Culture paradigm offers a productive representation of physics theory and examine its implications for the organization of physics curricula. Within this framework, the science taught and learned at schools appears as an epistemological family of fundamental theories that coexist rather than replace one another over time. We illustrate this approach through examples of teaching–learning materials, curricular structures, and summary lectures, and we briefly describe classroom implementations that tested this paradigm in physics education. The holistic perspective advanced here—emphasizing the hierarchical and interdependent structure of scientific theories—offers clear benefits for fostering public scientific literacy, which is largely shaped in school. In this view, science emerges as a theatre of theories, each illuminating the world through its own coherent vision.
In this article, we explore how Swedish upper secondary students’ perspectives on Nature of Science (NOS) relate to elements derived from the concept of Critical Science Agency (CSA). The elements of CSA used in this study are connected to aims of social justice in science education. The study responds to previous research that has argued for the need for empirical studies focusing on how NOS can contribute to social justice. Six focus groups were conducted with students who do not specialize in science. Through content analysis, three themes were developed, which include students’ NOS perspectives on: Scientific Practices and Inequalities; Scientific Products and Societal Needs; and Scientific Information and Trustworthiness. The themes indicate different directions in which students’ NOS perspectives can promote social justice. NOS content from the themes can potentially contribute to social justice by making science education feel more relevant to a wider range of students and by empowering them to critically examine science and to use scientific knowledge in personally and socially meaningful ways. Future research could further explore how NOS content from the derived themes can be implemented in science teaching to support students´ development of CSA.
International science education documents have advocated that the requirements of nature of science (NOS) should be gradually deepened as the grade level increases. Employing the framework of the family resemblance approach (FRA) to nature of science (NOS), this study innovatively examined the changes of NOS frequencies and connotations in chemistry textbooks across different school stages, under the context of Chinese curriculum reform. Data sources consisted of Chinese junior high school, and senior high school compulsory and selective chemistry textbooks, respectively designed for Grade 9, 10 and 11 students. The results indicated that there were differences regarding NOS representations in chemistry textbooks at different school stages. Specifically, compared to junior ones, senior high school chemistry textbooks involved NOS categories with a larger quantity and richer connotations. However, no progressions of NOS representations were found from senior high school compulsory to selective chemistry textbooks, as both exhibited similar NOS frequencies and connotations. Finally, explanations for the results, implications of the findings, and suggestions for future research were discussed.
This study synthesises two pivotal philosophical notions related to student learning in higher science education, i.e., embodied cognition and epistemic cognition, employing theoretical and empirical inquiries into epistemic practices in teaching laboratories. We conceptualise laboratory work as an authentic context for embodied, epistemic practices and critically review both philosophical notions in light of recent developments in science education. Through a multimethod approach combining interpretative phenomenological analysis, video observations, and multimodal discourse analysis, we characterise seven aspects of epistemic cognition and embodied cognition in the laboratory setting. Our findings reveal how students’ bodily experiences, cognitive processes, and engagement with scientific knowledge unfold in various stages of experimental work. We propose a hybrid, systemic view of cognition that elucidates four key processes: grounding processes, emergent processes, feedback processes, and embodied-affective mediation. The integrated perspective offers significant implications for pedagogy and curriculum development in higher science education, particularly in designing more effective and engaging laboratory experiences that leverage both embodied and epistemic dimensions of learning.
Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Nature of Science (NOS-PCK) is a core element for effective science teaching. While qualitative assessment of teachers’ NOS-PCK has advanced significantly, few studies have comprehensively validated the NOS-PCK structure quantitatively through multiple validity criteria. This study systematically examined the validity of an NOS-PCK survey instrument using a sample of 387 Chinese pre-service chemistry teachers enrolled in a university in China. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to construct a second-order structural model and to investigate convergent and discriminant validity. This was followed by the invariance test to examine factorial validity as related to gender. To establish the predictive validity of NOS-PCK, the relationships among teachers’ epistemological beliefs, NOS-PCK, and their capacity for planning technology-integrated lessons were also examined. Results demonstr ated that all four types of validity (i.e., convergent, discriminant, factorial, and predictive) were satisfactorily established. Implications for NOS-PCK research and teacher education are discussed.
This study explored differences in high school students’ decision-making modes, reasoning modes and reasoning levels when engaging with global socio-scientific issues (GSSI) versus local socio-scientific issues (LSSI). Depending on cultural, social, and regional characteristics, socio-scientific issues (SSI) can be categorized as GSSI and LSSI. Previous research suggests that individuals’ informal reasoning may be influenced by the locality and personal relevance of an SSI. However, this idea has not been thoroughly examined through direct comparisons of decision-making modes, reasoning modes, and reasoning levels across different types of SSI. The participants in this study were 44 twelfth-grade students (25 male, 19 female) who completed two open-ended written questionnaires: one focused on a GSSI topic (global warming) and the other on an LSSI topic (water pollution in Weishan Lake, Jining City). Each questionnaire required students to express their opinions, provide reasoning and formulate rebuttals. Through qualitative coding and quantitative analysis, the results revealed significant differences in students’ decision-making modes between GSSI and LSSI. In reasoning modes, students relied more on personal experience and value considerations when addressing LSSI, whereas their reasoning for GSSI was imbalanced, with limited reference to scientific considerations. In terms of reasoning levels, students generated significantly more rebuttals in the LSSI context than in the GSSI context. These findings underscore the need for differentiated instructional approaches when teaching GSSI vs. LSSI. Science teachers should support students in developing stronger informal reasoning related to GSSI, given that students naturally tend to engage more readily with LSSI.
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.
