Developing and Using Multiple Models to Promote Scientific Literacy in the Context of Socio-Scientific Issues

Exploring Resources and Reasoning Practices in Socioscientific System Modeling for Justice-Centered Science Education

Integrating science education with social justice is vital for preparing students to critically address significant societal issues like climate change and pandemics. This study examines the effectiveness of socioscientific system modeling as a tool within Justice-Centered Science Pedagogy (JCSP) to enhance middle school students' understanding of social justice science issues. It focuses on how system modeling can scaffold students' reasoning about complex social systems, informed by their lived experiences, cultural backgrounds, and social identities. Our research involved 27 middle school students using system models to explore the societal and scientific dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic. By leveraging the experiences and insights of students, educators can create transformative learning environments that not only recognize but also utilize students' unique knowledge bases as legitimate contributions to classroom discourse. The implications for instructional design highlight the need for multifaceted, responsive activities that align with the principles of JCSP and empower students as agents of societal transformation. The research contributes to the ongoing discourse on enhancing science education through justice-centered approaches that address the complexities of socioscientific context and the cultural relevance of scientific knowledge.

Research hotspots and development trends of model and modelling education research: Bibliometric analysis based on CiteSpace

Model-based learning and teaching are vital for addressing real-world challenges and are gaining research traction. This study, employing CiteSpace, analyses 583 articles, uncovering trends in authors, regions, and highly cited documents. Noteworthy focuses include learning achievements, technical support, and teaching approaches. Keyword analysis emphasises thinking cultivation and interdisciplinary integration. The study discusses current and future developments in modelling and modelling education research, particularly in learning evaluation and teacher professional development. Offering an international perspective, this analysis provides stakeholders with valuable insights. In summary, model-based learning's growth and influence are evident in the identified trends and future directions, guiding the field toward effective teaching strategies and solving complex problems. This research contributes to the broader understanding of modelling education's dynamics, facilitating informed decision-making for educators and policymakers.

Thinking in Terms of Change over Time: Opportunities and Challenges of Using System Dynamics Models

Understanding the world around us is a growing necessity for the whole public, as citizens are required to make informed decisions in their everyday lives about complex issues. Systems thinking (ST) is a promising approach for developing solutions to various problems that society faces and has been acknowledged as a crosscutting concept that should be integrated across educational science disciplines. However, studies show that engaging students in ST is challenging, especially concerning aspects like change over time and feedback. Using computational system models and a system dynamics approach can support students in overcoming these challenges when making sense of complex phenomena. In this paper, we describe an empirical study that examines how 10th grade students engage in aspects of ST through computational system modeling as part of a Next Generation Science Standards-aligned project-based learning unit on chemical kinetics. We show students' increased capacity to explain the underlying mechanism of the phenomenon in terms of change over time that goes beyond linear causal relationships. However, student models and their accompanying explanations were limited in scope as students did not address feedback mechanisms as part of their modeling and explanations. In addition, we describe specific challenges students encountered when evaluating and revising models. In particular, we show epistemological barriers to fruitful use of real-world data for model revision. Our findings provide insights into the opportunities of a system dynamics approach and the challenges that remain in supporting students to make sense of complex phenomena and nonlinear mechanisms.

Socio-Scientific Learning During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Comparing In-person and Virtual Science Learning Using Model-Evidence Link Diagrams

Science learning is an important part of the K-12 educational experience, as well as in the lives of students. This study considered students' science learning as they engaged in the instruction of scientific issues with social relevance. With classroom environments radically changing during the COVID-19 pandemic, our study adapted to teachers and students as they were forced to change from more traditional, in-person instructional settings to virtual, online instruction settings. In the present study, we considered science learning during a scaffold-facilitated process, where secondary students evaluated the connections between lines of scientific evidence and alternative explanations about fossil fuels and climate change and gauged the plausibility of each explanation. Our investigation focused on the relations between students' levels of evaluations, shifts in plausibility judgments, and knowledge gains, and examined whether there were differences in these relations between in-person classroom settings and virtual classroom settings. The results revealed that the indirect relational pathway linking higher levels of evaluation, plausibility shifts toward a more scientific stance, and greater knowledge gains was meaningful and more robust than the direct relational pathway linking higher levels of evaluation to greater knowledge gains. The results also showed no meaningful difference between the two instructional settings, suggesting the potential adaptiveness and effectiveness of properly-designed, scaffolded science instruction.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10956-023-10046-z.

Exploring the Retail Food Environment Surrounding Two Secondary Schools with Predominantly Pacific Populations in Tonga and New Zealand to Enable the Development of Mapping Methods Appropriate for Testing in a Classroom

Rates of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) are disproportionately high among people of Pacific ethnicity. Nutrition-related environmental exposures including food access and quality contribute to the matrix of factors impacting risk. Preventative interventions in adolescence and the opportunity to integrate health promotion into school-based learning are often overlooked. This study tested the potential of a low-cost method to map the retail food environment in a 1 km radius of two secondary schools in low socioeconomic communities with predominantly Pacific populations, in Tonga and New Zealand (NZ). Mapping utilized Google Earth, Google Maps, government maps, and observations. A rubric was developed to categorize food quality. Outlets within a 1 km radius of each school, (Tonga, n = 150; NZ, n = 52) stocked predominantly unhealthy foods. The NZ data compared favorably to previous studies, indicating the method was valid. The Tongan data is novel and indicates that alternative strategies can be used when access to GIS-type tools is limited. The method produced visual data that has the potential to be analyzed using strategies appropriate for secondary schools. The method should now be tested in classrooms to assess its potential to support school-age students to engage in mapping and critiquing the retail food environment.

Disagreement as context for science-civic learning: an analysis of discursive resources brought to bear by high school science students

Amid a broader sociopolitical milieu of division, disagreement, and uncivil debate, this study investigates instances of disagreement among students in a high school science classroom as they attempt to answer the civic question of what should we do about climate change, a long contentious topic in the USA. Using a theoretical framework that frames relational practices and ideological positions as discursive resources, this study analyzes the resources youth bring to bear within disagreement. Through discourse analysis and qualitative coding of naturalistic moments of disagreement, this study shows that youth leverage diverse constellations of discursive resources when disagreeing over science-civic matters. From this analysis, I suggest paths forward in terms of research and practice in efforts to prepare young people for science-civic participation that will inevitably involve disagreement with others in one's community.

The Development and Prospects of Socioscientific Issues Teaching in the Context of Immersive Media Technology

Marshall McLuhan once proposed the concept of "global village," believing that with the help of electronic media, Earth has become indistinguishable from a community, and there is only one Earth for human beings and one world for all countries. Today, with the continuous development of media technology, the concept of a human destiny community has also gained the general consensus of people around the world. The global value of the human destiny community encompasses the interdependent concept of international power, the concept of common interests, the concept of sustainable development, and the concept of global governance. In particular, the concepts of sustainable development and global governance have been advocated by the public, which in turn has led to extensive public discussions on Socioscientific Issues (SSI), in which the teaching of SSI is gradually considered by the international science education community as one of the important goals of science education. The current issues and challenges facing SSI teaching and how immersive media technologies can facilitate SSI teaching have become important issues of keen public interest.

Social Character of Science and Its Connection to Epistemic Reliability

Scientific research is a human endeavour, performed by communities of people. Disproportionate focus on only some of the features related to this obvious fact has been used to discredit the reliability of scientific knowledge and to relativize its value when compared with knowledge stemming from other sources. This epistemic relativism is widespread nowadays and is arguably dangerous for our collective future, as the threat of climate change and its denialism clearly shows. In this work, we argue that even though the social character of science is indeed real, it does not entail epistemic relativism with respect to scientific knowledge, but quite the opposite, as there are several characteristic behaviours of this specific human community that were built to increase the reliability of scientific outputs. Crucially, we believe that present-day scientific education is lacking in the description and analysis of these particularities of the scientific community as a social group and that further investing in this area could greatly improve the possibilities of critical analysis of the often very technical issues that the citizens and future citizens of our modern societies have to confront.