Editorial for Special Issue “Practices in Science and Engineering Education”

As Co-Editors of this Special Issue on science and engineering practices (SEP), we are delighted to curate five excellent submissions that have come our way over the last three years. What is the fuss about SEP one might ask? Even though the Editors are writing from a small island deep in the heart of South East Asia, the influence of SEP as a contemporary way of characterizing how science/engineering works and what should be taught in school science, has reached the ears of local policymakers too. Accordingly, recent science curriculum changes in Singapore have included a number of elements that US science teachers would immediately recognize, such as the SEP.

In addition to these commonalities in form, systems that adopt SEP in part or whole also face similar challenges. As the SEP literature has shown, policy and educational practice are sometimes incoherent or misaligned [1]; teachers have found it difficult to understand as well as to apply practice-based instruction as a robust yet flexible framework for guiding everyday instruction and enquiry. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that all five of the articles in this Special Issue have tried to address “what else needs work”. Indeed, SEP already has a decade of history within the educational landscape in the US, but how it has been understood or applied remains uneven at best. On the one hand, some researchers have been enthusiastic about the potential of SEP to transform science education in a highly significant manner. On the other hand, the realities on the ground tell a familiar story of struggle and perhaps even confusion among those agents that are arguably the most vital for its success—classroom teachers. These are the people that can truly make SEP function as epistemic practices, when teachers are able to plan “activities … to be taken up by the classroom community as recognizable forms of engagement that serve a purpose in joint knowledge-building” [2] (p. 1151). Such goals are as ambitious and challenging as much as they are very desirable.

Readers of this Special Issue will discover that contribution 1 evaluated students’ explanations for phenomenon occurring in oceans and marine ecosystems based on a framework for a gapless scientific explanation. Because scientific explanations are akin to the currency of science lessons, those practices linked to the explaining sphere of scientific activity have been the most active domain of study among researchers according to the Editors’ unpublished research on SEP. It was therefore regrettable, yet perhaps all too familiar, that the majority of the students in their study could not produce an explanation that was up to expectations.

Four articles in this Special Issue focused on teachers’ perceptions or their grasp of SEP. This situation is understandable, as the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and SEP in the US have placed numerous pedagogical demands on science teachers [3]. In contribution 2, the findings suggested that it was non-trivial to construct a valid and reliable measure of teachers’ knowledge of models and modeling in science, while contribution 3 showed that teachers tended to use/notice surface features (e.g., similarity in layouts) to determine the extent of similarity between NGSS and “NGSS-like” state standards, which seems problematic. It was also reported that pre-service teachers underestimated the importance of SEP in their contributions toward knowledge construction in science in general, and scientific argumentation in particular, while prioritizing the practice of asking questions (contribution 4). The latter was likely due to erroneously locating questioning in the pole position of a linear process of scientific inquiry. One immediate implication is that science teachers really need further support in making sense and meaning of SEP. The good news is that SEP-oriented professional development focused on developing and using models, and using mathematics and computational thinking demonstrated improvement in teachers’ interests in teaching the targeted SEPs (contribution 5). However, the teachers also expressed the least confidence about teaching the practices of using mathematics and computational thinking. Despite reporting the greatest increase in interest on this particular SEP, the teachers also reported that their lack of knowledge and ability to effectively implement this SEP were among the most common barriers to instruction of this SEP.

Notably, the five articles all focused on student and teacher participants from the US. Based on our understanding, various educational systems around the world have incorporated scientific practices or SEP in their education documents, such as South Korea and Singapore. We hope that this Special Issue will inspire researchers to continue/extend their research around SEP to these other systems so that we may collectively reach a deeper understanding of the state of the “practice turn” internationally. In particular, we hope to see greater activity in finding valid as well as reliable ways of assessing SEP and SEP-based instruction [4]. In most educational systems, there is an interplay between whatever is valued and whatever is measured. Thus, when teachers have the confidence and skills to implement such teaching and are provided with high-quality assessment tools for SEP, it could be said that we have definitely made a considerable advance in this endeavor.