In August 2005, over 500 researchers from the field of science education met at the 5th European Science Education Research Association conference. Two of the main topics at this conference were: the decrease in the number of students interested in school science and concern about the worldwide outcomes of studies on students’ scientific literacy. This volume includes edited versions of 37 outstanding papers presented, including the lectures of the keynote speakers.

This book features 35 of best papers from the 9th European Science Education Research Association Conference, ESERA 2011, held in Lyon, France, September 5th-9th 2011. The ESERA international conference featured some 1,200 participants from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe as well as North and South America offering insight into the field at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. This book presents studies that represent the current orientations of research in science education and includes studies in different educational traditions from around the world. It is organized into six parts around the three poles (content, students, teachers) and their interrelations of science education: after a general presentation of the volume (first part), the second part concerns SSI (Socio-Scientific Issues) dealing with new types of content, the third the teachers, the fourth the students, the fifth the relationships between teaching and learning, and the sixth the teaching resources and the curricula.

In August 2005, over 500 researchers from the field of science education met at the 5th European Science Education Research Association conference. Two of the main topics at this conference were: the decrease in the number of students interested in school science and concern about the worldwide outcomes of studies on students’ scientific literacy. This volume includes edited versions of 37 outstanding papers presented, including the lectures of the keynote speakers.

This book starts with the premise that beauty can be an engine of transformation and authentic engagement in an increasingly complex world. It presents an organized picture of highlights from the 13th European Science Education Research Association Conference, ESERA 2019, held in Bologna, Italy. The collection includes contributions that discuss contemporary issues such as climate change, multiculturalism, and the flourishing of new interdisciplinary areas of investigation, including the application of cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and digital humanities to science education research. It also highlights learners’ difficulties engaging with socio-scientific issues in a digital and post-truth era. The volume demonstrates that deepening our understanding is the preferred way to address these challenges and that science education has a key role to play in this effort. In particular, the book advances the argument that the deep and novel character of these challenges requires a collective search for new narratives and languages, an expanding knowledge base and new theoretical perspectives and methods of research. The book provides a contemporary picture of science education research and looks to the theoretical and practical societal challenges of the future.

The National Science Foundation funded a synthesis study on the status, contributions, and future direction of discipline-based education research (DBER) in physics, biological sciences, geosciences, and chemistry. DBER combines knowledge of teaching and learning with deep knowledge of discipline-specific science content. It describes the discipline-specific difficulties learners face and the specialized intellectual and instructional resources that can facilitate student understanding. Discipline-Based Education Research is based on a 30-month study built on two workshops held in 2008 to explore evidence on promising practices in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. This book asks questions that are essential to advancing DBER and broadening its impact on undergraduate science teaching and learning. The book provides empirical research on undergraduate teaching and learning in the sciences, explores the extent to which this research currently influences undergraduate instruction, and identifies the intellectual and material resources required to further develop DBER. Discipline-Based Education Research provides guidance for future DBER research. In addition, the findings and recommendations of this report may invite, if not assist, post-secondary institutions to increase interest and research activity in DBER and improve its quality and usefulness across all natural science disciples, as well as guide instruction and assessment across natural science courses to improve student learning. The book brings greater focus to issues of student attrition in the natural sciences that are related to the quality of instruction. Discipline-Based Education Research will be of interest to educators, policy makers, researchers, scholars, decision makers in universities, government agencies, curriculum developers, research sponsors, and education advocacy groups.

This book reports the results of a research project that investigated assessment methods aimed at supporting and improving inquiry-based approaches in European science, technology and mathematics (STM) education. The findings were used to influence policy makers with guidelines for ensuring that assessment enhances learning. The book provides insights about: - The concept of competence within the STM domains and its relevance for education - The conceptualisation and teaching of four key competences: scientific inquiry, mathematical problem-solving, design processes, and innovation. - Fundamental aspects of the two main purposes of assessment, formative and summative, the relations between the two purposes and ways of linking them. - The main challenges related to the uptake of formative assessment in daily teaching-learning practices in STM and specifically, the usability of formative on-the-fly dialogue, structured assessment dialogue, peer assessment and written teacher feedback. - The systemic support measures and tools teachers need in order to integrate formative assessment of student learning into their classroom practices and how it can conflict with summative assessment practices. - How research-based strategies for the formative use of assessment can be adapted to various European educational traditions to ensure their effective use and avoid undesirable consequences. - How relevant stakeholders can be invited to take co-ownership of research results and how a productive partnership between researchers, policy makers, and teachers can be established. - Concrete research vistas that are still needed in international assessment research.

"This volume of the World of Science Education gathers contributions from Latin American science education researchers covering a variety of topics that will be of interest to educators and researchers all around the world. The volume provides an overview of research in Latin America, and most of the chapters report findings from studies seldom available for Anglophone readers. They bring new perspectives, thus, to topics such as science teaching and learning; discourse analysis and argumentation in science education; history, philosophy and sociology of science in science teaching; and science education in non-formal settings. As the Latin American academic communities devoted to science education have been thriving for the last four decades, the volume brings an opportunity for researchers from other regions to get acquainted with the developments of their educational research. This will bring contributions to scholarly production in science education as well as to teacher education and teaching proposals to be implemented in the classroom"--