The age-old debate about the relation between science and society has, in the last two decades, materialized in novel forms at many universities. In this article, we follow the reconfiguration of relevance at one institute of higher education that aspires to become an impact-driven university. We employ a socio-technical instrumentation…

Teaching socio-scientific issues (SSI) fosters students' ethical reasoning, yet many educators struggle with integrating these topics into science classrooms. This exploratory mixed-methods study investigates how ethical reflection influences adolescents' attitudes toward animal experimentation and their ethical orientations. The study involved 72…

The latest mutation of Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI, is more than anything a technology of writing. It is a machine that can write. In a world-historical frame, the significance of this cannot be understated. This is a technology in which the unnatural language of code tangles with the natural language of everyday life. Its form of…

Science educators face significant challenges in preparing learners with the skills and knowledge necessary for 21st-century functional scientific literacy. This stems from high expectations of students and a growing demand for them to apply their learning to complex issues with political, social, environmental, and economic dimensions. The…

Recent efforts to make undergraduate biology more inclusive include developing content that explores how human values and priorities impact science, and previous work documents how instructors value an "ideologically aware" biology curriculum that highlights these themes. Here, we surveyed a national sample of undergraduate students in…

Graph neural networks (GNN) are vital for analyzing real-world problems (e.g., network analysis, drug interaction, electronic design automation, e-commerce) that use graph models. However, efficient GNN acceleration faces with multiple challenges related to high and variable sparsity of input feature vectors, power-law degree distribution in the…

Many museums deal with socio-scientific issues--meaning topics with multiple perspectives and ongoing research, such as climate change, vaccinations, or livestock farming. As important and trusted sources of science education, museums can play a critical role in raising awareness about such issues. They tend to highlight the various perspectives…

Socio-scientific issues (SSI) instruction positions the understanding and practice of science in the context of issues that are informed by science but require reasoning about their societal dimensions to respond to those issues effectively. For this reason, instruction in the context of SSI has been considered the gateway to contemporary visions…

To cultivate the capability of making informed decisions on socioscientific issues, ideally, we hope students would engage in discerning and evaluating justifications for and against different positions while constructing well-structured, persuasive arguments. When argumentations do not develop ideally, it is important to understand the…

For many years, hegemonic approaches to teaching the nature of science (NOS) have focused mainly on understanding some epistemic (i.e., rational, or cognitive) aspects involved in the construction of science. So, aspects of a non-epistemic (i.e., non-rational, contextual, or extra-scientific) nature have been practically neglected in these…

Integrating socioscientific issues (SSI) into classrooms to address science-related social matters has gained attention. Educational comics show promise in introducing SSI content; however, previous studies focus on higher education, leaving gaps in elementary school implementation. We interviewed eight practitioners to explore design principles…

Few empirical studies in Science Education have investigated the contributions of integrating scientific practices such as argumentation and modelling. In this article, I examine the characteristics of high school students' argumentative dialogues in different modelling situations. From this, I discuss the influences of modelling and the nature of…

Public science events (PSEs) are an increasingly popular mode of informal science engagement. The burgeoning research on PSEs suggests a number of important benefits for visitors to these events, including increased scientific knowledge, improved attitudes toward science, and an increased awareness of science in everyday life. However, these…

The rise of social media platforms and subsequent lack of traditional gatekeeping mechanisms have enabled the proliferation of scientific disinformation. Users attempting to properly evaluate scientific information and disinformation are immensely obstructed by media communication mechanisms such as filter bubbles and echo chambers. Given the…

This study aims to investigate how students mobilise scientific and socio-political knowledge about climate change in communicative actions directed at the public. It presents a teaching and learning proposal for high school science classes, focusing on critical communication and action in the context of climate change. Grounded in the…