Using engineering design to teach science requires teachers to engage in noticing, interpreting, and responding to students’ needs in real-time. While research has begun to focus on how elementary teachers do so, less is known about how teachers instructionally support and optimize students’ ideas through engineering design feedback. In this study we investigate what instructional moves two elementary teachers’ employ to leverage students’ ideas and reasoning and create opportunities for students to exchange design feedback. Data were gathered using classroom observations of teachers’ implementations of a design task focused on sound and energy transformation. Observations were coded for teachers’ use of high-leverage practices, and event maps were created to chronicle teachers’ implementation of the task from start to finish. Event maps were analyzed and compared for discrete instructional activities and modes of classroom organization that supported opportunities for feedback. Findings suggested that while teachers used similar instructional moves, how and when they created opportunities for student design feedback differed, resulting in diverse ways of assessing and supporting students’ understandings. Implications suggest design feedback as both a purposeful and naturally present phenomenon throughout the design process, reflective of the nature of engineering design.

The study on mathematical performance was significant enough to be studied further to measure students' self-efficacy. Although studies on student self-efficacy in math performance from a gender perspective were abundant, studies on this relationship from the perspectives of ethnic culture and gender were scarce. Therefore, the objective of this study was to examine the self-efficacy of Bugis Junior High School students in solving math problems based on gender. The researchers used an algebra problem in the context of the Bugis ethnic culture. For this data set, two of 25 students at a public junior high school in Bone, South Sulawesi, Indonesia, were interviewed based on ethnicity and gender. Qualitatively, the triangulation technique was employed for data analysis. The study results revealed that male students outperformed girls in terms of self-efficacy, namely magnitude, strength, and generality, in math performance. Furthermore, female students had lower self-efficacy in terms of confidence, supportive experience in completing math tasks, and confidence in their ability to complete math tasks in similar or different contexts, compared to male students, who had higher self-efficacy. This result provided new knowledge by exploring the characteristics of students' self-efficacy by integrating ethnicity and gender.

The diversity of definitions of science literacy has resulted in a diversity of measurement tools. However, adult science literacy is mainly assessed on short standardized and non-contextualized questions, thus making the study of adult science literacy more qualitative than quantitative. Here we describe the rationale, development, and validation of a questionnaire that associates the use of science in the specific science-related setting of parents of hard of hearing children with general and topic-specific science knowledge. The questionnaire went through four developmental steps: (1) gathering input from hearing rehabilitation experts and parents, (2) testing the close-ended questionnaire (n=10), (3) open-ended questionnaire (n=24), (4) online close-ended questionnaire (n=91). These all assessed general science knowledge, contextual science knowledge in the field of hearing and parents' advocacy knowledge and attitudes. These steps and the resulting assessment tool can thus inform the further development of measures of adult science literacy in context. The findings suggest that although general science knowledge enables the application of science to everyday science-related problems it only explained a small proportion of the variance in contextual science knowledge. Thus, the results strongly point to the importance of measuring adults' science literacy in a context that is relevant to the responders. The findings also underscored the disappointing outcomes of secondary science education, in that formal scientific background predicted general science knowledge but did not account for contextual science knowledge at all. This should elicit concern as to the ability of students to use science knowledge in future personally important science related contexts.

Science, magic, and education have always been linked, from science-based magic shows to teachers presenting demonstrations as magic tricks to capture their students’ interest and provide a mnemonic reference for the topics under discussion. Magic as an art form is also often used to convey information or act as an analogy for invisible phenomena. This study examined how the use of a magic effect designed as an analogy for active and passive transport in cells affected student scores and perception of the activity when compared to a standard story analogy in a high school integrated science course. To determine this, students participated in either a magic-based analogy activity (MBAA) or a concrete story-based analogy activity (SBAA), and then data was collected and analysed using a pre-test/post-test for the content and a Likert-scale anonymous survey for the student perception of the activity. The MBAA was shown to be similar to the SBAA in helping students learn but had the added benefit of increasing students’ reported engagement with the activity. This study shows how bringing magic into the science classroom can have a positive impact on student engagement and provides teachers with another option to support student learning.

Data from over 1,500 middle-grade mathematics students were used to investigate their mathematical affect and identity. Early secondary students were asked if they considered themselves mathematicians and a prompt was employed to substantiate their mathematical identity. Separating by gender and grade affiliation (6, 7, and 8), Chi-square and Z-score analyses were used to compare subgroups. Data show that the gap in male and female mathematics identity and affect is shrinking. Though progress has occurred in encouraging young women to consider themselves mathematicians, work remains. Consistent with previous research concerning the sustained and relatively permanent nature of mathematical affect/identity at grade six, in this study it appeared to become stable near grade 7 (approximately age 13). Perhaps not ironically, grade seven appears to be the age at which adolescents enter a period of successful abstract reasoning, and the age (13) aligns with the beginning of pre-algebra for many grades seven students.