Opportunities for K-8 Students to Learn Statistics Created by States' Standards in the United States

Statistical literacy is key in this heavily polarized information age for an informed and critical citizenry to make sense of arguments in the media and society. The responsibility of developing statistical literacy is often left to the K-12 mathematics curriculum. In this article, we discuss our investigation of K-8 students' current opportunities to learn statistics created by state mathematics standards. We analyze the standards for alignment to the Guidelines for the Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE II) PreK-12 report and summarize the conceptual themes that emerged. We found that while states provide K-8 students opportunities to analyze and interpret data, they do not offer many opportunities for students to engage in formulating questions and collecting/considering data. We discuss the implications of the findings for policy makers and researchers and provide recommendations for policy makers and standards writers.

Instruction for metacognition in science classrooms: Harsh realities and a way forward?

The development and enhancement of science students' metacognition should be an important goal of science education. The extent to which it is, however, is questionable. The explosion of science information (and misinformation) around issues such as climate change, COVID-19, the Anthropocene, and sustainability makes developing students' potentials to be aware of how to manage and monitor the quality of their science learning a priority for consideration by science educators. This is because individuals' science learning will need to continue long after they complete formal schooling. However, attempts to prioritize instruction for metacognition in science education have faltered, stagnated, and lack momentum. This chapter identifies key reasons for this situation and proposes considerations to (re)elevate instruction for metacognition into science classrooms. The considerations involve reorienting research perspectives in the field of metacognition research in science education, considering increasing attention to metacognition in pre- and in-service teacher education, being realistic about our expectations for instruction for metacognition in science learning contexts, and considering the use of Open Educational Resources (OERs) such as podcasts and websites that can be accessed across countries by pre-service and practicing teachers and teacher educators to inform them about metacognition and about instruction for metacognition. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023. All rights reserved.

Did the Pandemic Impact the Brains of Our Science Students?

Ian Gotlib, lead author of the study stated, "We know that early adversity and stress can accelerate biological aging and brain maturation. [...]these students face a higher risk of memory and learning problems and may be why we are seeing skyrocketing cases of anxiety and depression among our students since the pandemic. The articles in this special issue provide ideas for teachers to upgrade their knowledge on immunology, gain ideas for infusing immunology into their teaching, and rethink applicability and language of the standards to include scientific phenomena that emerge daily but are not necessarily reflected within NGSS and state standards.

Fitting Percentage of Body Fat to Simple Body Measurements: College Women

Percentage of body fat, age, weight, height, and 14 circumference measurements (e.g., waist) are given for 184 women aged 18–25. Body fat, one measure of health, was accurately determined by an underwater weighing technique which requires special equipment and training of the individuals conducting the process. Modeling body fat percentage using multiple regression provides a convenient method of estimating body fat percentage using measures collected using only a measuring tape and a scale. This dataset can be used to show students the utility of multiple regression and to provide practice in model building.

Statistical Literacy—Misuse of Statistics and Its Consequences

Although statistical literacy has become a key competence in today's data-driven society, it is usually not a part of statistics education. To address this issue, we propose an innovative concept for a conference-like seminar on the topic of statistical literacy. This seminar draws attention to the relevance and importance of statistical literacy, and moreover, students are made aware of the process of science communication and are introduced to the peer review process for the assessment of scientific papers. In the summer term 2020, the seminar was conducted as a joint project by the University of Hamburg, the University of Muenster, and the Joachim Herz Foundation. In this article, we present the concept of the seminar and our experience with this concept in the summer term 2020.

Hands on activities in emergency remote teaching – form and subject content in science and technology education in the primary teacher program during covid-19

Teacher education has a dual mission;to teach specific subject content to student teachers but also to provide them with examples of how this subject content can be taught in a school context. This dual task is particularly important and difficult in relation to technology and science education, where construction activities, laboratory work and excursions are central practices. As covid-19 struck, Swedish universities had to adapt to emergency remote teaching, ERT. In this study, we explore three university teachers' experiences of adapting laboratory work, excursions, and construction tasks to ERT. The analysis shows that both form and subject content were affected by this adaptation in that students' opportunity to practice science and technological practices and procedures decreased, as well as teachers' possibility to gain feedback from their students. In turn, new ways of communicating and supporting students were developed. © 2022 Johanna Frejd & Jonas Hallström.

Marginalizing Misinformation - The Fast-and-Frugal Way

What is the evidence for a consensus among the relevant scientific community? [...]if the source proves credible, ask yourself, "Do they exhibit relevant expertise?" Namely, does the person have the depth of knowledge to vouch for this claim? [...]if you have a credible and expert source, is there evidence that the majority of scientists concur? (Time will vary depending on the depth and complexity of the issue.) Possible scientific claims for students to evaluate include * Do cell phones or 5G communication towers cause cancer? * Can ivermectin prevent COVID-19? * Can earthquakes be precisely predicted? * Are GMO foods safe to eat? * Are recent extreme weather events (hurricanes, droughts, floods) related to climate change? *

Assessment of oral communication skills of chemistry department students in polymer chemistry courses at online learning

Online learning should ensure that students' oral communication skills remain good. This study aimed to determine the oral communication skills of chemistry department students in polymer chemistry courses at online learning based on differences in gender and study program. The research design was quantitative descriptive. The data collection tool was an observation sheet about the assessment of oral communication skills collected during presentation activities. The sample was 73 students. Data were analyzed utilizing a one-way analysis of variance test. The findings reveal that students' oral communication skills based on gender have differences, but the difference was not significant. The oral communication skills of male students are higher than female students. There was a significant difference in students' verbal communication skills based on study programs. Chemistry students' oral communication skills have higher than chemistry education students. The implications of the research results are described.

Innovative Digital Practices and Globalization in Higher Education. Advances in Higher Education and Professional Development (AHEPD) Book Series

We are moving toward a future in which digital practices are becoming more ubiquitous. Also, there is evidence to suggest that innovative digital practices are changing the face of 21st-century learning environments. Critical to 21st-century teaching and learning success is continued emphasis on learner preferences, shaped by innovative digital technology-driven learning environments alongside teacher awareness, knowledge, and preparedness to deliver high-impact instruction using active learning pedagogies. Thus, the purposeful and selective use of digital learning tools in higher education and the incorporation of appropriate active learning pedagogies are pivotal to enhancing and supporting meaningful student learning. "Innovative Digital Practices and Globalization in Higher Education" explores innovative digital practices to enhance academic performance for digital learners and prepare qualified graduates who are competent to work in an increasingly global digital workplace. Global competence has become an essential part of higher education and professional development. As such, it is the responsibility of higher education institutions to prepare students with the knowledge, skills, and competencies required to compete in the digital and global market. Covering topics such as design thinking, international students, and digital teaching innovation, this premier reference source is an essential resource for pre-service and in-service teachers, educational technologists, instructional designers, faculty, administrators, librarians, researchers, and academicians.

IT CAN HAPPEN HERE!

One would expect a wildfire exploration in a region prone to wildfires to begin close to home, not Australia, but that is where it started. Lowry teaches preK in a constructivist school in an area prone to wildfires, earthquakes, winds, and floods. One of her students went back to visit relatives in Australia during the winter of the 2019-2020 school year, immediately before the initial COVID-19 quarantine. They emailed the student regularly and heard about the intense heat where he was visiting. They looked up Australia in the news and saw images of the wildfires. After a little work comparing Australia and their area, one of the students said, "This could happen here! We HAVE to do something!"

Practical learning in hybrid environments: Can remote learning be active, authentic, and real?

Online strategies designed to enable practical learning were in use prior to the pandemic. Nevertheless, in response to the rapid shift to online delivery during lockdowns, face-to-face practical learning was often postponed and replaced with traditional transmissive and theory-focused modes. This paper reports undergraduate and postgraduate university students' online learning experiences in New Zealand, where some practical learning approaches were evident particularly in the fields of teacher education, health or medicine, and sciences. Using multiple methods, data stemmed from a national survey followed by individual interviews and focus groups. Findings affirm that practical learning is possible in hybrid contexts, and is no less real than learning on campus. In-home or community-based activities, virtual simulations, online practice, and video-based learning all offer engaging opportunities for practical learning.

Designing and Implementation of Web-enhanced Inquiry Learning for Literacy in Science Platform for Post COVID-19 Education

Teaching and learning for school science became more challenging during the COVID-19 pandemic as regular science classes were offered online in real-time remote, synchronized, asynchronized, and hybrid learning modes. In science education, students often cannot collect the real-time data necessary for inquiry in science classrooms. During the COVID-19 outbreak, web-based or e-learning platforms play a significant role in science education during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. To overcome the outbreak limitation, teachers and students were required to transform their teaching and learning to be online with and without the available online platforms, enabling both teachers and learners to easily different learning sources and make teaching and learning work efficient and effective. Therefore, this study proposed a prototype of a Web-enhanced Inquiry Learning for Literacy in Science (WILL-S) platform aiming to provide innovative and flexible teaching to enhance the science competencies of middle school students. This web platform allows teachers and students to maximize their teaching practices and learning processes in science. A preliminary evaluation of the proposed platform was carried out with eight in-service science teachers and 221 middle school students from eight different secondary schools located in northeastern Thailand to estimate their acceptance of the proposed platform from teachers' and students' perspectives. The preliminary result was the positive acceptability of the teachers and students. © 2023 IEEE.

Learning Complex Technology Online: Effect of Challenge and Hindrance Techno-stressors on Student Satisfaction and Retention

Despite increasing attention to online learning worldwide, learning complex technologies online has always been challenging and even hindersome to students, who are subjected to elevated levels of technostress. In contrast to most previous studies that focused on the negative side of technostress, this study investigated both the negative and positive sides of technostress. Based on the challenge hindrance framework (CHF), the holistic stress model (HSM), and the person-environment fit (P-E Fit) model, we examined how challenge and hindrance techno-stressors caused distress and eustress in online students and lead to associated outcomes. We empirically validated the research model by analyzing survey data collected from 565 online graduate business students enrolled at a university in the United States. The results revealed that some hindrance and challenge techno-stressors were associated with techno-distress and techno-eustress, which further impacted student satisfaction and student retention. We discussed the contributions and implications and provided future research directions.

Identity negotiation and cosmopolitanism in social media: The case of London and Sao Paulo migrant communities

This chapter aims to examine the role of social media in building cosmopolitan dispositions of individuals living across borders by comparing the experiences of migrants' communities in London and São Paulo. These two cities represent the contrasts between one global city in the Global North, London, and one in the Global South, São Paulo. Specifically, it exposes how social media enables cosmopolitan dispositions for migrant communities in the two cities. This project investigates dispositions to build cosmopolitanism in London and São Paulo and examines the lives of different migrants communities in these cities. The theoretical discussion on cosmopolitanism, based on cosmopolitan dispositions, refers to the emergence (real or ideal) of a world or universal community that shares values, political institutions, identities, and rights and responsibilities but embraces cultural diversity (Delanty, The cosmopolitan imagination: The renewal of critical social theory. Cambridge University Press, 2009, 2012). Research on cosmopolitan dispositions of individuals explains openness to and appreciation of other cultures, values, and experiences. These characteristics are examined in studies which highlight the following dispositions: a sense of belonging to/identification with a community more significant than the nation-state;trust and tolerance of ethnic minorities, and cultural Others;support for equal rights for immigrants;respect for human rights;an interest in cross-cultural consumption of goods, culture, or media;and support for international governance and the globalization of economies and societies. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022. All rights reserved.

Teaching science in charter schools: Facilities, equipment, teacher perceptions, and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic

Although there has been a significant increase in the number of charter schools, little is known about their science education programs from the science teachers' perspective. Also, the COVID-19 pandemic created limitations for all participants that required new untested approaches that varied depending on circumstances. The first study in this dissertation explored secondary charter school science teachers' perceptions related to their schools' science programs. With the use of the Science Laboratory Classroom Facility and Science Instructional Materials Survey and a semi-structured interview protocol, secondary charter school science teachers' (N=105) perceptions of laboratory equipment, safety equipment, facilities, science standards, and autonomy were examined, and a subsample of teachers (n=21) was interviewed. The findings showed that charter school science teachers taught in facilities that were inadequate for science laboratory instruction. Many teachers lacked the most essential laboratory and laboratory safety equipment. Other findings included a high degree of reported autonomy related to instructional decision-making. These results suggested that the quality of charter school science programs could be strengthened by adequately funding science laboratories, equipment, safety equipment, and engaging science teachers in program and facilities planning. The second study utilized a subsample of teachers interviewed in the first study to examine charter school secondary science teachers' online teaching in response to COVID-19. Specifically, this study explored teachers' instructional approaches, teaching constraints, and work-related stressors with a semi-structured interview framed within a Community of Inquiry framework. The findings were that greater planning, training, hardware, and software infrastructure preparation, guidance on instruction formats or standardization, peer support systems, and communication were needed to address future crises such as COVID-19 and to enhance similar urgent transitions to online learning. Implications for future research and pedagogy are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Introduction to the Symposium: Parasitism and the Logics of Anti-Indigeneity and Antiblackness

The more recent crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the contemporary protocols of the Western European-American parasitic paradigm. As any scholar of the Black Radical Tradition have argued, the emergence of global capitalism is indelibly tied to the emergence of the transatlantic slave trade and is constitutive of the emergence of Black(ness)/racialization of Black people. Furthermore, the underlying assumptions of Western modernity's so-called scientific paradigm for comprehending the world, facilitates the justification of the ascendancy of whiteness in a hierarchy of being. Both racial capitalism and coloniality of being embodies the parasitism of the modern world-system that results in the dynamics of the pandemic.

WORKER WELL-BEING: Transforming From a Traditional to a More Holistic OSH Program

[...]in 1996, with campus president support, an umbrella safety council was created that includes representation of both OSH and non-OSH activities. Over time, the non-OSH representation has expanded, incorporating representatives from areas such as human resources, building facilities management, employee assistance and wellness, mental health, environmental waste management, campus security and disaster preparedness. With the safety councils support, the wellness and employee assistance programs conducted focus group discussions and determined a major cause of the observed stress was rooted in personal financial management challenges. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the safety council members became concerned about the overall well-being of the university community and, as such, assisted in the conduct of two waves of a campus-wide survey measuring aspects such as mental health, well-being concerns about COVID-19, personal finance worries and accessing reliable sources of information.

Redesigning Laboratory Learning for Undergraduate Science Students: A Cross-Canadian Student Perspective

Campbell discusses the redesign of laboratory learning for undergraduate science students. In May 2021, 15 students from across Canada began an interdisciplinary master's program amid a global pandemic. They came from diverse academic backgrounds, including medical sciences, psychology, and molecular biology, with a shared goal of learning about science through an interdisciplinary lens. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the need for increased equity and accessibility in undergraduate laboratory learning environments. Accordingly, they have identified effective strategies to promote positive laboratory environments for undergraduate students based on the following experiences: laboratory bootcamps, worksheets/quizzes, point-of-view and animated videos, and postlaboratory responses

The Evolution of Science Education: You Don't Know? YouTube It

Teachers can increase the retention of their students' attention and lead them to be engrossed in new, different, and innovative ways using videos. In the present condition wherein, all educational institutions are implementing hybrid learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic, technologies are becoming an inseparable part of students' life. This study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of YouTube in teaching Science Education. The researchers employed a quasi-experimental research design using 30 first-year students from the Polytechnic University of the Philippines Bataan Branch as respondents. Two groups were used in the study, the control and experimental groups, from the two sections of the same program. The study found that the performance of both groups, and students' scores increased significantly from the pretest to the posttest. Moreover, the experimental group's performance increased significantly compared to the traditional group. Thus, both teaching methodologies are effective in teaching science education to students. Teachers may utilize different teaching methodologies to augment the needs of the learners regardless of the situation. The main goal of the teachers is to facilitate learning and to ensure that the learners will be able to grasp all the needed information during their academic period. © The Author(s) 2023.

Drama as a Powerful Tool to Enrich Socio-scientific Argumentation.

Socio-scientific argumentation (SSA) is increasingly being recognized as a key aspect of scientific literacy. Much of the reason for this is that this skill is crucial for helping students to become active participants in twenty-first-century democratic societies in which the construction of informed and critical views of socio-scientific issues (e.g. climate change, COVID-19 vaccination, genetic testing) plays a fundamental role. The problem is that instructors rarely give students explicit and research-based opportunities to enrich their SSA skills. Therefore, the aim of this study was to provide evidence that drama can be used as a platform to enrich argumentation in genetic testing. The data were derived from the written responses and the audio recordings of seventy-six university students (37 females and 39 males, 16-29 years old) in Colombia during a complete drama-based teaching-learning sequence (TLS) supervised by the same instructor. The outcomes suggest that the sequence can be used to enrich argumentation in genetic testing as it effectively provided participants with explicit opportunities to produce both arguments and counterarguments about the controversy whether the use of genetic tests among people should be encouraged. This study contributes to the literature on SSA in science education by demonstrating that drama is a promising tool to enhance argumentation about science-based social issues. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10763-022-10320-3.