The prevalence of diseases stemming from poor nutrition emphasizes the importance of educating people about healthy eating habits. One approach to achieving this is through educational escape games, which embody the features of a situated learning environment. Utilized the situated learning theory as a theoretical and methodological framework, the goal of our study was to examine the role of science-based educational escape games in facilitating knowledge construction and awareness about healthy nutrition. The study was conducted in the setting of a science teacher preparation program, where 165 preservice science teachers were engaged in an escape game named Zombie Attack about proteins in food and the human body. The study applied the pretest-posttest design, in which quantitative and qualitative data were collected concurrently before and after game participation. The findings showed that the escape game experience had a positive effect on the participants’ knowledge gain associated with topics such as energy of macronutrients, protein percent daily value, and proteins in the body. With regards to awareness about healthy nutrition, the study identified five types: Health, Composition, Environment, Source, and Ethics, with a significant gain in all categories following the escape game experience. Overall, the study advocates the use of escape games as a method for fostering interactive learning of scientific concepts, encouraging collaborative problem-solving, and facilitating self-reflection activities.

Background

As artificial intelligence (AI) technology rapidly advances, it becomes imperative to equip students with tools to navigate through the many intricate ethical considerations surrounding its development and use. Despite growing recognition of this necessity, the integration of AI ethics into higher education curricula remains limited. This paucity highlights an urgent need for comprehensive ethics education initiatives in AI, particularly for science and engineering students who are at the forefront of these innovations. Hence, this research investigates the role of an online explicit-reflective learning module in fostering science and engineering graduate students' ethical knowledge, awareness, and problem-solving skills. The study’s participants included 90 graduate students specializing in diverse science and engineering research tracks. Employing the embedded mixed-methods approach, data were collected from pre- and post-intervention questionnaires with closed-ended and open-ended questions.

Results

The study's results indicate that the online explicit-reflective learning module significantly enhanced students' knowledge of AI ethics. Initially, students exhibited a medium–high level of perceived ethical awareness, which saw a modest but statistically significant enhancement following the participation. Notably, a more distinct increase was observed in students' actual awareness of ethical issues in AI, before and after the intervention. Content analysis of students’ responses to the open-ended questions revealed an increase in their ability to identify and articulate concerns relating to privacy breaches, the utilization of flawed datasets, and issues of biased social representation. Moreover, while students initially displayed limited problem-solving abilities in AI ethics, a considerable enhancement in these competencies was evident post-intervention.

Conclusions

The study results highlight the important role of explicit-reflective learning in preparing future professionals in science and engineering with the skills necessary for ethical decision-making. The study highlights the need for placing more emphasis not only on students’ ability to identify AI-related ethical issues but also on their capacity to resolve and perhaps mitigate the impact of such ethical dilemmas.

The growing trend of “escape games” in science education instigates debate over their pedagogical value, with researchers calling for more emphasis on theory-based design processes. Thus, the current study’s goal was to identify situated learning components that can be associated with educational escape games and to generate a methodology that integrates these components into the design of science-based educational escape games. Applying the deductive content analysis approach, data were collected through a survey and semi-structured interviews among 54 science teachers and seven game design experts. Four situated learning components, authentic situations, scientific contents, collaborative learning, and self-reflection, were associated with the design of educational escape games. In addition, planning and evaluation were identified as important attributes of game design methodology, with each stage including three iterative sequential inner stages associated with two or more situated learning components. The study contributes new insights to the domain of science-based educational escape games, providing guidelines and examples for science teachers and game developers.

The study examines massive open online course (MOOC) students' engagement and learning challenges while comparing two groups: xMOOC, a structured course based on individual learning, and cMOOC, an interactive course based on collaborative learning. Applying a mixed-methods research design, data were collected via an online survey and semi-structured interviews. The findings indicated differences in students' "engagement profile" between the two groups. The xMOOC students asserted high means for cognitive and behavioral engagement, whereas the cMOOC students asserted high means for cognitive and social engagement. The main challenge for xMOOC students was the complexity of course content, while the cMOOC students were more concerned about technical problems. The results reinforce the need for teaching staff to adjust student support according to MOOC type.

The Family Resemblance Approach (FRA) was developed by Irzik and Nola (2011, 2014) to provide a unifying and holistic account of the nature of science (NOS). Building on existing consensus (e.g., Abd-El-Khalick & Lederman, 2000; Eflin et al., 1999; Lederman, 2007; McDonald, 2017) and grounded in the scholarship of the philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science, the FRA provides a structural account of the main characteristics of “science,” depicting it as a family of disciplines that share similar features, but also positions each discipline (e.g., chemistry, physics, and biology) as different in nuanced ways. According to the FRA, NOS can be systematically and comprehensively characterized in terms of a number of science categories which exhibit strong similarities and overlaps among diverse scientific disciplines.

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) provide unparalleled opportunities for group work with learners worldwide. Online group work has many challenges, such as generating innovative scientific outcomes in collaboration with peers from diverse backgrounds. Limited study was conducted on group diversity and its association with students’ innovative thinking—the cognitive and social processes that lead to the application of new or significantly improved scientific ideas. Therefore, the goal of this study was to identify the diversity level of groups formed by MOOC learners, and to examine its association with learners’ perceived innovative thinking and group projects’ innovation level. The study was conducted in the context of a MOOC on nanomaterials. Applying the quasi-experimental design, data were collected among higher education science and engineering learners (N = 109) via pre- and post-questionnaires and learners’ scores for group project innovation. Findings indicated a significant positive correlation between group diversity in terms of academic discipline and learners’ perceived innovative thinking. Findings further indicated significant positive correlations between academic discipline diversity, academic level diversity, and group project innovation. Conversely, mother tongue diversity was negatively correlated with group project innovation. This suggests that the level of nanotechnology projects’ innovation depends on learners’ ability to communicate effectively online.

Fostering technology-enhanced science learning in elementary schools is an ongoing challenge as young students are not always motivated to engage with science lessons. The use of technology, such as digital sensors and data recorders, has been found to result in higher engagement with science. However, the association between technology-enhanced science learning and students’ motivation to learn, from a cross-cultural viewpoint, is still discussed among researchers. Thus, the goal of this study was twofold: (a) to examine the motivation to learn science of elementary school students from different countries and cultural backgrounds; (b) to identify phases of technology-enhanced science learning and their association with students’ motivation. Applying the sequential mixed-methods research design, data were collected via questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, and online observations. The study included seven experienced science teachers from the USA and Israel and 109 sixth-grade students: English speakers (N = 43), Arabic speakers (N = 26), and Hebrew speakers (N = 40). The findings indicated differences in students’ internal motivation, in terms of “interest and enjoyment,” “connection to daily-life,” and “cross-cultural interactions,” with medium ratings for “self-efficacy.” The study identified and characterized two consecutive phases of technology-enhanced science learning—“divergence” and “convergence”—that can be associated with motivation to learn science. Overall, the study’s results highlight the importance of seamlessly embedding technology to support cross-cultural learning of scientific practices.

The proliferation of fake news and pseudoscience requires a proactive educational approach to the cultivation of critical thinking (CT); yet, university lecturers and students alike appear to have insufficient guidance. Moreover, studies on CT overlook globalization trends such as student mobility, where international students are a significant portion of the student body. Therefore, the goal of this study was to examine the way CT is conceptualized and experienced by instructors, local students, and international students from China in a science and engineering university, and accordingly design a culturally inclusive theoretical framework for CT cultivation in the digital era. The study applied an integrated dual-analytic approach, where data was collected via a survey and semi-structured interviews. The findings show that many instructors and students lack a comprehensive understanding of CT skills. The findings also show that the international students were more familiar with CT in theory and practice than the local students, with “analysis” as one of the prominent skills experienced in academic courses. The study presents a technology-enhanced instructional framework that integrates individual learning with collaborative and culturally inclusive assignments.

The goal of this study was to examine the way preservice science teachers depict and develop their understanding of nature of science (NOS), from the perspective of the family resemblance approach (FRA). FRA defines NOS as a Cognitive-Epistemic and Social-Institutional system. Appling the dual-analytic approach via reflective drawing analysis, we studied participants’ drawings and written explanations, before and after participating in a “methods of teaching” course. The findings indicated a significant increase in the number of preservice science teachers who associated NOS with scientific practices, methods and methodological rules, scientific knowledge, and scientists’ professional activities. The findings also indicated an increase in the number of categories identified within the Cognitive-Epistemic domain, and an increase in the number of new categories associated with the Social-Institutional domain. The FRA-related activities resulted in an improvement trajectory, indicating a transition from a stance based on a learner’s perspective of asking everyday questions toward a more epistemic, social, and institutional stance, depicting understanding of NOS from a scientist viewpoint.

Engineering education has slowly been making its way into schools with the aim of promoting engineering literacy, which is central to learning and working in a technology-oriented society. Educators and policy makers advocate the need for developing students’ understanding of the nature of engineering (NOE); yet, there is an ongoing debate on the heuristics that should be applied. In this article, we review and discuss current studies on engineering education in schools and the integration of engineering into the science curriculum. We describe four aspects of engineering fields: Structures, Machines, Materials, and Data, each uniquely characterized by the technology used and the artefact produced. We discuss the application of the Family Resemblance Approach (FRA) to the characterization of NOE, focusing on the cognitive and epistemic domain. Accordingly, we describe NOE through four categories: Aims & Values, Engineering Practices, Methods & Methodological Rules, and Engineering Knowledge, which can guide teaching and learning about NOE. Building on the FRA, this paper provides a framework for a continuous discussion on NOE and the theoretical and practical relationships between science and engineering.