One of the goals of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education is to promote students' understanding of and interest in STEM careers. However, young students often hold stereotypical perceptions of STEM professionals. This study aimed to apply two newly developed checklists to explore upper elementary students' perceptions…

Emerging empirical evidence supports play's potential to stimulate and foster scientific creativity. Focusing on how play relates to scientific creativity in adulthood, this review synthesizes the current state of knowledge in four areas: the play element in scientific research, the playfulness of scientists, mechanisms through which play affects…

High school students' perceptions often do not capture the diversity and opportunity intrinsic within science. University outreach programmes represent an ideal opportunity to increase students' exposure to diverse scientific fields and dismantle limiting perceptions. The authors examined the impact of a university-based science outreach programme…

Students learn more than science knowledge in a science classroom; they also acquire important messages about the purposes and contexts of science. Roberts (2011) calls these messages a companion story. In this article, we present a case study of high-profile Australian contemporary scientists to argue that there is a need to broaden the range of…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which promoting sense of community moderates the relationship between servant leadership style and socially responsible leadership (SRL) of public universities in Uganda. Design/methodology/approach: The study adopted cross-sectional survey design to collect data at one point in time…

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs)have been shown to result in increased science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) persistence, but such experiences are rarely available for first-year STEM students. This work outlines the development and integration of a CURE into a year-long honors general chemistry laboratory…

Featuring scientists in classroom materials provides opportunities for students to relate to scientists as role models and see themselves in science. However, it is unclear what information students find most relatable when encountering scientists throughout their education. In this study, we manipulated the amount and type of information provided…

Many thinkers are accustomed to separating facts and values--knowledge and morality. They believe that morality enters into the choices scientists and scholars make about what is worth studying, but after that, the cold logic of evidence assessment takes over. This sells science and scholarship short. I will suggest that science and scholarship,…

Textbooks are an important aspect of students' school lives and the representation of scientists in textbooks is a proxy for the representation of who can do science. This study investigated the names of scientists and other people mentioned in four commonly used textbooks in the three education systems in the UK and Republic of Ireland (England,…

This research seeks to answer the question of why sociologists teach at community colleges, how they view their choices and how they view the discipline of sociology. I theorize that contrary to community college teaching being a "fall back" position, many sociologists actively seek those positions deliberately to enact social justice…

Language that uses noun labels and generic descriptions to discuss people who do science (e.g., "Let's be scientists! Scientists discover new things") signals to children that "scientists" is a distinctive category. This identity-focused language promotes essentialist beliefs and leads to disengagement from science among young…

The transition from industry to academia can present unique challenges for new faculty members in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. Considering high drop, fail, withdraw (DFW) rates in undergraduate STEM courses and the need to increase the number of well-prepared graduates in these areas, it is important to better…

We investigated how to improve PSC at a large, public university with high research activity by examining scientists' interest and enjoyment in PSC, their perceived aptitude of PSC skills, the channels they use for PSC, their reasons for choosing to participate in PSC, and the tools they need to engage effectively. We conducted a case study and…

Our qualitative interviews with 16 early-career South African researchers investigated how they view public engagement and its role in their research careers, as well as the motivations, challenges and institutional factors that shape their engagement efforts. We situate our findings in the context of high societal diversity and inequality in…

The most obvious feature of expertise in chemistry is content knowledge, which defines the primary objectives of instruction. Research in chemistry education, and STEM education more broadly, has also devoted attention to students' developing scientific practices of reasoning, investigation, and learning. In this study, we set out to investigate…