Professional learning networks (PLNs) have great potential to amplify science teachers’ professional growth in today’s digital age. Through self-directed and generative experiences, PLNs can bolster agency, enhance instructional capacity, and foster greater autonomy, all of which are essential to teachers’ learning. This case study explored how 44 science teachers engaged with Digital Curation (DC) platform, designed with PLN principles reported professional growth across five key dimensions: managing teaching resources effectively, increasing content knowledge, experiencing technological innovation and creativity, crafting varied and targeted teaching units, and sharing best practices. Thus, DC functioned as a catalyst for teachers to develop skills and habits essential for their professional learning networks. The results indicate that teachers experienced significant improvement in managing digital resources while simultaneously refining their ability to adapt instruction to diverse student needs. These results can help educational researchers and policymakers shape the development of online, flexible, innovative, and collaborative professional learning models.

We present a layered, iterative modeling framework anchored in an authentic slope-descent problem that guides students from idealized to realistic physics. Starting with a frictionless energy-conservation model, we introduce air-drag equilibrium and a half-constant-acceleration approximation to reveal how each stage adds insight into mass- and geometry-dependent drag effects. We then employ numerical simulations, accessible via spreadsheets or simple code, to bolster computational intuition before deriving a closed-form analytical solution using differential and integral relations between acceleration and displacement. Framing motion in terms of displacement rather than time helps clarify the non-conservative energy losses. Trialed with pre-service teachers, this activity yielded high engagement, rich peer discussions, and strong modeling practices. We outline how educators can adapt the layered sequence by balancing analytical rigor and computational simplicity to diverse curricular levels, thus empowering students to tackle ill-structured, real-world physics challenges.

The gender achievement gap in higher STEM education is well documented as STEM course grades often show a bias favoring men, even when controlling for overall student achievements. The current work, which was preregistered prior to data collection, replicates and extends prior work to evaluate several possible contributors to the gender gap in advanced STEM courses. The contributing factors include students’ STEM-preparedness, learning assessment design, and students’ activity level in the course. We analyzed the data of a cohort of 315 undergraduate engineering students in a leading technological university in Israel. A mixed-effect model analysis revealed a gender gap in both high-stakes and low-stakes assessments of learning. We found that the gap first appears in lower-division undergraduate mathematics courses and remains steady through advanced STEM courses, with relatively little variance between different courses. We further found that students’ activity in the course’s learning management system is not associated with a gap reduction. The analysis suggests that the gender gap can be traced back, at least in part, to students’ STEM-preparedness when entering college. Notably, although the gap is traced prior to college, high-school grades likely show a ceiling effect and are thus not representative of the gap shown later in college. Therefore, it may be that other preparatory factors contribute to this gap, outside of or in addition to high-school performance.

We investigated the impact of project-based learning (PBL) on undergraduate food engineering students’ learning outcomes, focusing on food science, biotechnology, chemical knowledge, and thinking skills. The PBL course was offered in the department of biotechnology and food engineering at a research-intensive STEM university and emphasized context-based learning through the planning, design, and production of an innovative food product. Data were collected using a mixed-methods approach. The study included 68 students who completed questionnaires and presented scientific posters and final projects. We assessed students’ learning outcomes in four domains: (a) their ability to explain key concepts and processes (actual knowledge), (b) their self-confidence regarding these constructs, (c) their ability to identify the main subject of a paragraph in a scientific paper, and (d) their capacity to pose complex questions about the papers they had read. We further examined the transfer of theoretical and practical knowledge in designing and presenting a novel food product, as well as students’ monitoring of their knowledge along the cognitive–metacognitive spectrum. The findings revealed significant correlations between students’ knowledge and most of their skills, as well as between their knowledge and final project grades. This study contributes to the growing body of literature on undergraduate students’ cognitive and metacognitive development and offers a method to detect monitoring skills by comparing students’ actual disciplinary knowledge with their self-confidence in that knowledge.

The socioeconomic status (SES) of youths is known to have a significant bearing on their political subjectivities, including their motivations, approaches, and strategies around engaging in political activities. This makes high-SES youth activism a unique subfield of inquiry within the broader field of youth social movement. To document the state of the art, considering both the dominant theoretical and methodological approaches as well as topical issues in the field, we undertook a structured review of relevant extant literature. The results show, though the field is underpinned by a wide array of theories and methods, that there are still few theoretical or methodological innovations that exist to address the specificities of high-SES youth activism. The review also uncovers a growing research interest in understanding the pedagogical implications of the participation of high-SES youth in social and political action aimed at effectively addressing social inequities more widely and examining class reproduction in such activism.

Inquiry-based learning with interactive simulations is widely used in science education. However, learners often struggle to engage productively and benefit fully without appropriate support. To provide such support, it is crucial to better understand the inquiry patterns learners exhibit and how these relate to learning outcomes across different activities. In this study, we apply a clustering approach to investigate learners’ interactions with STEM interactive simulations through three distinct paradigms of feature abstraction. For each paradigm, we construct a transition matrix per learner and simulation, capturing the sequence of inquiry actions. These matrices are then processed using a spectral clustering pipeline to identify groups of learners with similar behavioral patterns. We apply this method to log data from 135 learners engaging with two different simulations. Across both simulations, we consistently identify two distinct clusters. These clusters show similar behavioral patterns and are associated with comparable learning outcomes, with the larger cluster typically demonstrating a deeper understanding of the underlying scientific concepts. Moreover, we find that most learners maintain the same inquiry pattern across simulations, suggesting that the identified behaviors reflect stable approaches to inquiry rather than task-specific strategies. Our results also reveal that prior knowledge and activity order influence the strategy learners adopt. Finally, we show that while the three paradigms yield largely overlapping clusters, each highlights different aspects of learner interaction, demonstrating the relative robustness of our findings to the chosen data representation.

Through a thematic analysis of policy documents from state and federal education authorities, we explore how institutional structures and governance dynamics shape opportunities for youth engagement in Washington, DC. By examining how youth activism is framed and operationalized in policy, we ask: What does youth activism entail, and how is it defined and understood in the DC educational policy context? Our findings reveal that while references to youth activism are frequent, policy attention tends to center on global issues such as climate change, often overlooking local activism and the specific needs of communities. These patterns reflect a fragmented and shifting approach to youth participation across different levels of the education system, which can both enable and constrain meaningful involvement. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the complex challenges and possibilities for youth activism, emphasizing how institutional priorities and power dynamics influence the roles young people are invited or permitted to play in shaping public education.

This ongoing study explores an approach to learning basic skills in computer-aided design (CAD), 3D printing, and robot operation in a unified context through the workshop practice in cloud-based design, fabrication, and use of robot gripper accessories. The 8-h workshop was part of the Production Systems Design course for students majoring in industrial engineering and management at the Technion Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences. The workshop made use of the new generation robot Baxter and leveraged the capability for making custom-made fingertips and attaching them on the robot’s gripper fingers. The workshop assignment was to design, 3D print, attach to Baxter’s gripper, and test fingertips for grasping awkward-to-hold objects such as a cylinder, a double frustum, and a ball. The new cloud-based CAD system Onshape has enabled students’ design practice online and in groups, as well as the use of the new system tools of simulation and automatic tracking. The findings of our study, based on the Onshape’s record of design activities and the post-workshop questionnaire, indicated that in the workshop the students acquired skills in cloud-based collaborative design. They evaluated the acquired knowledge as relevant and important for their future profession. The authors plan to continue the study and conduct the workshop with a larger group of students.

Computational thinking (CT) is a critical 21st-century skill that equips undergraduate students to solve problems systematically and think algorithmically. A key component of CT is computational creativity, which enables students to generate novel solutions within programming constraints. Humanoid robots are increasingly explored as promising tools to enhance CT skills, fostering teamwork and creativity in collaborative settings. However, gaps remain in understanding how different learning modalities impact the development of these skills. This study examines the comparative effects of robot-guided and simulation-based collaborative learning on undergraduate students’ computational creativity and CT skills. The study involved 71 undergraduate students, divided into small groups and randomly assigned to begin with either a robot-guided or simulation-based modality, switching to the alternate modality in the following session. Data were collected through group log data and pre- and post-intervention questionnaires. The results indicated that the robot-guided modality significantly enhanced computational creativity in terms of originality and elaboration, while both modalities supported flexibility equally. Additionally, students reported higher CT skills following the robot-guided activity, with the most notable improvements in cooperation and creativity. Lastly, fewer group interaction difficulties were reported during the robot-guided activity, supporting its value for collaborative learning. These findings highlight humanoid robots as a valuable complement to virtual learning environments, offering unique opportunities to foster creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving in undergraduate education.

Purpose This study examines how political and ideological shifts shape citizenship education by analysing how school curricula reflect broader political agendas and influence young people’s civic engagement and activism. Method We conduct a content analysis comparing two Polish curricula: Historia i Teraźniejszość (HiT), introduced by a right-wing government in 2022, and Edukacja Obywatelska (EO), introduced by a centre-left government in 2025. Findings HiT promotes nationalist and conservative values through a fixed-knowledge model that restricts pupil agency. By contrast, EO emphasises participatory, transparent and activist-oriented approaches. However, its optional status and uneven implementation limit its effectiveness, particularly in politically polarised regions. Implications Situating these reforms within broader socio-political and educational contexts, this study demonstrates that curriculum change is not ideologically neutral but deeply embedded in political struggles over the role of youth in democracy.