Critical Issues And Bold Visions For Science Education

Critical Issues and Bold Visions for Science Education addresses diverse critical issues using rich theoretical frameworks and methodologies, and while retaining complexity, offers transformative visions within a context of political tensions, historical legacies, and grand challenges associated with Anthropocene.

Educational researchers are bound to see this as a timely work. It brings together the work of leading experts in argumentation in science education. It presents research combining theoretical and empirical perspectives relevant for secondary science classrooms. Since the 1990s, argumentation studies have increased at a rapid pace, from stray papers to a wealth of research exploring ever more sophisticated issues. It is this fact that makes this volume so crucial.

"This book comprises a wide range of scholarly essays introducing readers to key topics and issues in science education. Science education has become a well established field in its own right, with a vast literature, and many active areas of scholarship. Science Education: An International Course Companion offers an entry point for students seeking a sound but introductory understanding of the key perspectives and areas of thinking in science education. Each account is self-contained and offers a scholarly and research-informed introduction to a particular topic, theme, or perspective, with both citations to key literature and recommendations for more advanced reading. Science Education: An International Course Companion allows readers (such as those preparing for school science teaching, or seeking more advanced specialist qualifications) to obtain a broad familiarity with key issues across the field as well as guiding wider reading about particular topics of interest. The book therefore acts as a reader to support learning across courses in science education internationally. The broad coverage of topics is such that that the book will support students following a diverse range of courses and qualifications. The comprehensive nature of the book will allow course leaders and departments to nominate the book as the key reader to support students – their core ‘course companion’ in science education."

The author takes readers on a journey of a large number of issues in designing actual studies of knowing and learning in the classroom, exploring actual data, and putting readers face to face with problems that he actually or possibly encountered, and what he has done or possibly could have done. The reader subsequently sees the results of data collection in the different analyses provided. The author shows how one writes very different studies using the same data sources but very different theoretical assumptions and analytic technique. The author brings his publication experience in very different disciplines-including science education, mathematics education, teacher education, curriculum, applied cognitive science, linguistics, social studies of science, and epistemology-into play to provide readers with way of experiencing research as praxis. The book is organized around six major themes (sections), in the course of which it develops the practical problems an educational researcher might face in a large variety of settings. In Part A, Collecting Data, the author introduces design experiments and ethnographic designs; in Part B, Analyzing Data, finding the right zoom level and focus, cognitive phenomenology, discourse analysis, and conversation analysis constitute the organizing themes. For each theme, the author uses one of his extensive databases to draw on examples, problems, decisions, solutions, and so on. The book was written to be used by upper undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in research design; because of its practical approach, it is highly suitable for those contexts where research methods courses do not exist. The audience also includes professors, who want to have a reference on design and methodology, and those who have not yet had the opportunity to employ a particular method.

The critical analysis of science textbooks is vital in improving teaching and learning at all levels in the subject, and this volume sets out a range of academic perspectives on how that analysis should be done. Each chapter focuses on an aspect of science textbook appraisal, with coverage of everything from theoretical and philosophical underpinnings, methodological issues, and conceptual frameworks for critical analysis, to practical techniques for evaluation. Contributions from many of the most distinguished scholars in the field give this collection its sure-footed contemporary relevance, reflecting the international standards of UNESCO as well as leading research organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (whose Project 2061 is an influential waypoint in developing protocols for textbook analysis). Thus the book shows how to gauge aspects of textbooks such as their treatment of controversial issues, graphical depictions, scientific historiography, vocabulary usage, accuracy, and readability. The content also covers broader social themes such as the portrayal of women and minorities. "Despite newer, more active pedagogies, textbooks continue to have a strong presence in classrooms and to embody students’ socio-historical inheritance in science. Despite their ubiquitous presence, they have received relatively little on-going empirical study. It is imperative that we understand how textbooks influence science learning. This book presents a welcome and much needed analysis." Tina A. Grotzer Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA The present book provides a much needed survey of the current state of research into science textbooks, and offers a wide range of perspectives to inform the 'science' of writing better science textbooks. Keith S Taber University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

The Wiley Handbook of Global Educational Reform examines educational reform from a global perspective. Comprised of approximately 25 original and specially commissioned essays, which together interrogate educational reform from a critical global and transnational perspective, this volume explores a range of topics and themes that fully investigate global convergences in educational reform policies, ideologies, and practices. The Handbook probes the history, ideology, organization, and institutional foundations of global educational reform movements; actors, institutions, and agendas; and local, national, and global education reform trends. It further examines the “new managerialism” in global educational reform, including the standardization of national systems of educational governance, curriculum, teaching, and learning through the rise of new systems of privatization, accountability, audit, big-data, learning analytics, biometrics, and new technology-driven adaptive learning models. Finally, it takes on the subjective and intersubjective experiential dimensions of the new educational reforms and alternative paths for educational reform tied to the ethical imperative to reimagine education for human flourishing, justice, and equality. An authoritative, definitive volume and the first global take on a subject that is grabbing headlines as well as preoccupying policy makers, scholars, and teachers around the world Edited by distinguished leaders in the field Features contributions from an illustrious list of experts and scholars The Wiley Handbook of Global Educational Reform will be of great interest to scholars and graduate students of education throughout the world as well as the policy makers who can institute change.

In this era of mandated high stakes and standardized testing, teachers and schools officials find themselves struggling to meet the demands for improved student achievement. At the same time, they are also expected to teach all subjects as required by national and state curriculum standards.

This handbook gathers in one volume the major research and scholarship related to multicultural science education that has developed since the field was named and established by Atwater in 1993. Culture is defined in this handbook as an integrated pattern of shared values, beliefs, languages, worldviews, behaviors, artifacts, knowledge, and social and political relationships of a group of people in a particular place or time that the people use to understand or make meaning of their world, each other, and other groups of people and to transmit these to succeeding generations. The research studies include both different kinds of qualitative and quantitative studies. The chapters in this volume reflect differing ideas about culture and its impact on science learning and teaching in different K-14 contexts and policy issues. Research findings about groups that are underrepresented in STEM in the United States, and in other countries related to language issues and indigenous knowledge are included in this volume.