The promotion of socioscientific decision-making: Addressing four challenges in science education practice and research

A central objective of science education is to prepare students for the negotiation of science-related social issues (i.e., socioscientific issues) and to support them in reaching informed decisions. The ability to include both scientific and normative considerations into the negotiation has been summarized under the term socioscientific decision-making. Although socioscientific decision-making has been widely acknowledged as an essential component of students’ scientific literacy, difficulties remain concerning its promotion and assessment. In a first step, this dissertation outlines four challenges connected to the development of students’ socioscientific decision-making from a teaching-learning perspective (Challenge 1: The structure of the learning environment; Challenge 2: The complexity of socioscientific issues) and from a measurement perspective (Challenge 3: Conceptualization of socioscientific decision-making; Challenge 4: Assessment of socioscientific decision-making). To address the aforementioned challenges, three studies have been carried out as part of this dissertation. Each study aimed to extend the current knowledge about the development of students’ socioscientific decision-making in formal and non-formal learning opportunities. Study 1 comprises a systematic literature review, which considers empirical studies that explore the promotion of (1) students’ socioscientific decision-making in (2) sustainability-related and (3) extracurricular learning opportunities. Two different notions of socioscientific decision-making have been revealed as part of the results: Decision-making as a rational and mostly individual, and as a more cooperative, socially embedded process. Furthermore, no studies have been found with an equal distribution of attention among all three components. This shortcoming has been empirically investigated in Study 2, which assesses a sustainability-related extracurricular learning opportunity (an environmental science competition) in its effectiveness to promote participants’ socioscientific decision-making. The analysis of data supports the conceptualization of socioscientific decision-making as a multi-phased process; a conceptualization which has already been recognized among the science education community. On the other hand, the results from Study 2 confirm the presence of the two previously identified notions. The findings further suggest that participating in this science competition predominantly fosters the preparational phase of socioscientific decision-making. In contrast to Study 1 and Study 2, Study 3 focuses on formal learning opportunities (i.e., the regular classroom) and examines students’ argumentation as part of their decision-making process. The results of Study 3 provide evidence that an increase in issue familiarity does not enhance the diversity of argument types presented by students; however, the depth of already predominant types is manifested. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, this dissertation provides novel insights into the promotion and assessment of students’ socioscientific decision-making by addressing the four previously identified challenges. The present work concludes with two final recommendations for contemporary science education. First, more attention should be paid to extracurricular learning opportunities, as they can empower students to investigate socioscientific issues that are meaningful to their lives. The second recommendation stresses the value of interdisciplinary working for the negotiation of complex socioscientific issues and thus the development of students’ socioscientific decision-making. """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""Note: The manuscript of Study 3 (pp. 91- 119) is a previous non-peer-reviewed version of an article which has now been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Science Education, published by Taylor & Francis: Garrecht, C. Reiss, M. J., & Harms, U. (2021). 'I wouldn't want to be the animal in use nor the patient in need' – The role of issue familiarity in students' socioscientific argumentation. DOI: 10.1080/09500693.2021.1950944

Scientific Reasoning in Science Education: From Global Measures to Fine-Grained Descriptions of Students’ Competencies

This book is a reprint of the Special Issue "Scientific Reasoning in Science Education: From Global Measures to Fine-Grained Descriptions of Students’ Competencies" published in the journal Education Sciences. It compiles all manuscripts of the special issue

Improving Hybrid Brainstorming Outcomes with Scripting and Group Awareness Support

Previous research has shown that hybrid brainstorming, which combines individual and group methods, generates more ideas than either approach alone. However, the quality of these ideas remains similar across different methods. This study, guided by the dual-pathway to creativity model, tested two computer-supported scaffolds – scripting and group awareness support – for enhancing idea quality in hybrid brainstorming. 94 higher education students,grouped into triads, were tasked with generating ideas in three conditions. The Control condition used standard hybrid brainstorming without extra support. In the Experimental 1 condition, students received scripting support during individual brainstorming, and students in the Experimental 2 condition were provided with group awareness support during the group phase in addition. While the quantity of ideas was similar across all conditions, the Experimental 2 condition produced ideas of higher quality, and the Experimental 1 condition also showed improved idea quality in the individual phase compared to the Control condition

The student-produced electronic portfolio in craft education

The authors studied primary school students’ experiences of using an electronic portfolio in their craft education over four years. A stimulated recall interview was applied to collect user experiences and qualitative content analysis to analyse the collected data. The results indicate that the electronic portfolio was experienced as a multipurpose tool to support learning. It makes the learning process visible and in that way helps focus on and improves the quality of learning. © ISLS.Peer reviewe

Examining scientific thinking processes in open-ended serious games through gameplay data

Research on scientific problem-solving emphasizes the importance of problem solving and scientific inquiry as central components of the twenty-first century skills. Research has shown that open-ended serious games can facilitate students’ development of specific skills and improve learning performance through scientific problem-solving. However, understanding how students learn these complex skills in a game environment is a major challenge, as much research depends on typical paper-and-pencil assessments and self-reported surveys or other traditional observational and quantitative methods. The participants of the study were 237 sixth graders from two middle schools in the Southwestern area of the United States. The students used an open-ended serious game called Alien Rescue as their science curriculum for three weeks. The purpose of this study is, first, to identify students’ navigation behavior patterns in cognitive processes between at-risk and non-at-risk students within Alien Rescue. To accomplish this purpose, this study intends to use gameplay data by incorporating the integrated method of lag sequential analysis and sequential pattern mining together with a statistical analysis. The findings confirmed that the integrated method helped to explore students’ latent navigation behaviors as well as discover the differences of problem-solving processes between non-at-risk and at-risk students. The second purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between students’ learning performance and their scientific inquiry behaviors, which emerged as students engaged with Probe Design Center in this serious game. The results showed that the game metrics developed in Probe Design Center improved the predictions of both in-game and after-game performance. The cluster analyses with game metrics confirmed four unique groups regarding students’ scientific inquiry behaviors in Probe Design Center. This study concluded that the integrated methods of serious games analytics enabled researchers to investigate in-depth cognitive processes and scientific inquiry behaviors within a specific cognitive tool, Probe Design Center, and discover unique behavior groups across different school settings. The researcher identified the challenges of at-risk students in their cognitive processes and highlighted the support needs for these students. Consequently, this study proposed an interactive dashboard using the data-driven evidences to provide teachers just-in-time information to support students’ cognitive processes.Curriculum and Instructio

Understanding children’s causal reasoning during collaborative discussions

This study aims to understand the construction of multilink causal reasoning chains during collaborative discussions in elementary school classrooms. The construction of reasoning chains was investigated in 24 collaborative discussions involving 160 underserved fifth-grade children. The effects of group features, individual characteristics, and moment-by-moment situational influences on seven causal chain models were tracked in the discussions. Results indicated that students who were more talkative, had better oral English, and were more liked by their classmates were more likely to produce causal chains. The turn-by-turn analysis of chain construction revealed that once a causal chain was initiated, it was likely to continue for at least three speaking turns. Leaders and socially centered students supported other group members, the shy and quiet students, to extend chains of reasoning. Agreement among group members and support from leaders and socially centered students extended the chain of reasoning. However, refutation and disagreement stopped the chain because the group had to resolve disputed ideas in order to develop a shared understanding. A temporal analysis of chain production indicated that chain construction speeds up over the course of a discussion. Students who produced more causal chains during the discussion also generated more causal chains in an individually written essay after the discussion. A causal analysis showed that peer dialogue mediates the effects of social and cognitive characteristics on chain production in the essay and the mediating effect increases with increases in the number of peer-generated causal chains during the discussions. Overall, this analysis of the social construction of multilink causal reasoning chains provides distinctive new evidence that enabling meaningful interaction among children promotes their higher-level cognitive development

Research on Teaching and Learning In Biology, Chemistry and Physics In ESERA 2013 Conference

This paper provides an overview of the topics in educational research that were published in the ESERA 2013 conference proceedings. The aim of the research was to identify what aspects of the teacher-student-content interaction were investigated frequently and what have been studied rarely. We used the categorization system developed by Kinnunen, Lampiselkä, Malmi and Meisalo (2016) and altogether 184 articles were analyzed. The analysis focused on secondary and tertiary level biology, chemistry, physics, and science education. The results showed that most of the studies focus on either the teacher’s pedagogical actions or on the student - content relationship. All other aspects were studied considerably less. For example, the teachers’ thoughts about the students’ perceptions and attitudes towards the goals and the content, and the teachers’ conceptions of the students’ actions towards achieving the goals were studied only rarely. Discussion about the scope and the coverage of the research in science education in Europe is needed.Peer reviewe

Retrieval-, Distributed-, and Interleaved Practice in the Classroom:A Systematic Review

Three of the most effective learning strategies identified are retrieval practice, distributed practice, and interleaved practice, also referred to as desirable difficulties. However, it is yet unknown to what extent these three practices foster learning in primary and secondary education classrooms (as opposed to the laboratory and/or tertiary education classrooms, where most research is conducted) and whether these strategies affect different students differently. To address these gaps, we conducted a systematic review. Initial and detailed screening of 869 documents found in a threefold search resulted in a pool of 29 journal articles published from 2006 through June 2020. Seventy-five effect sizes nested in 47 experiments nested in 29 documents were included in the review. Retrieval- and interleaved practice appeared to benefit students’ learning outcomes quite consistently; distributed practice less so. Furthermore, only cognitive Student*Task characteristics (i.e., features of the student’s cognition regarding the task, such as initial success) appeared to be significant moderators. We conclude that future research further conceptualising and operationalising initial effort is required, as is a differentiated approach to implementing desirable difficulties

Enhancing Free-text Interactions in a Communication Skills Learning Environment

Learning environments frequently use gamification to enhance user interactions.Virtual characters with whom players engage in simulated conversations often employ prescripted dialogues; however, free user inputs enable deeper immersion and higher-order cognition. In our learning environment, experts developed a scripted scenario as a sequence of potential actions, and we explore possibilities for enhancing interactions by enabling users to type free inputs that are matched to the pre-scripted statements using Natural Language Processing techniques. In this paper, we introduce a clustering mechanism that provides recommendations for fine-tuning the pre-scripted answers in order to better match user inputs