Argumentation is central to science education and also occurs in confessional religious education, although the two subjects authorize different sources, standards, and purposes of justification. This convergent mixed-methods study examined how 176 Muslim, Christian, Druze, and Jewish teachers in Israel understood argumentation and managed science-religion questions in classroom practice. Participants taught either science or confessional religious education. A deliberately abbreviated questionnaire, adapted conceptually from the Oxford Argumentation in Religion and Science program, contained two five-point quantitative items and three open-ended prompts. Welch’s independent-samples tests compared perceived similarity between scientific and religious arguments and the reported frequency with which religious topics entered lessons; thematic analysis examined definitions of argument and dialogue and descriptions of teachers’ classroom responses. The overall difference in perceived similarity was small and non-significant, although Muslim science teachers reported higher similarity than Muslim religious education teachers in an exploratory subgroup comparison. Religious education teachers reported more frequent entry of religious topics overall, with substantial differences among Christian and Druze participants and a smaller difference among Jewish participants. Written responses associated argument with justified claims but distinguished dialogue as either respectful coexistence of viewpoints or critical evaluation of reasons. Religious education teachers more often sustained cross-domain discussion, whereas science teachers more often redirected it to preserve curricular focus. Because religious affiliation was measured without religiosity or a nonreligious option, affiliation-specific findings should not be treated as evidence of personal belief. The study identifies disciplinary boundary management as a central issue for teacher education and curriculum design.
Assumptions about the role of subjectivity in science shape how knowledge is constructed, validated, and communicated, yet these assumptions are often implicit, particularly within the natural sciences, which are frequently characterized as objective. This study examines how academics conceptualize the role of subjectivity in the natural sciences and whether shared understandings exist. Using Q methodology, participants sorted a set of statements derived in part from Evelyn Fox Keller’s reflections on scientific practice, enabling the systematic identification of distinct viewpoints. Analysis revealed two divergent perspectives. The first, The Ideal is Objective Science, emphasizes objectivity, empirical rigor, and the minimization of subjectivity, reflecting assumptions aligned with Karl Popper’s critical rationalism. The second, Scientists as Human Beings, foregrounds the inescapable role of human judgment, interpretation, and context in scientific work, emphasizing communication and collaboration, and resonating with Thomas Kuhn’s account of scientific practice. Importantly, participants did not explicitly reference these philosophical frameworks, suggesting that such orientations may operate implicitly within academic thinking. The findings indicate the presence of distinct epistemic positions regarding subjectivity in science. This divergence raises important questions about how science is represented and taught, particularly when assumptions about objectivity and subjectivity remain unexamined. By empirically identifying competing viewpoints, this study contributes to ongoing discussions in science education and philosophy of science concerning the role of subjectivity in scientific inquiry.
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.
