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Science Education towards Sustainable Development Goals

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Education and Approaches".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (24 March 2024) | Viewed by 3145

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Physics, University of Pavia, 27100 Pavia, Italy
Interests: physics education; ICT in education

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Guest Editor
Department of Physics, University of Trento, 38123 Povo, TN, Italy
Interests: physics education and communication; teacher training; teaching methods; new technologies; virtual reality; augmented reality

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The question “how can science education help society progress towards sustainable development goals?” is not a new one, and many researchers have provided partial answers in recent decades. For example, the construct of critical science agency (Basu et al., 2009) has proven fruitful for interpreting the process by which individuals develop the intention to change their lives, or the lives of others, using scientific knowledge. Additionally, since a deep conceptual understanding of a given scientific topic is key to the development of critical scientific agency, the whole community of science education researchers may be called to further the development of educational strategies, improving their conceptual understanding of scientific topics related to the sustainable development goals. Thus, issues such as climate change; scarcity of, or unequal access to, vital resources; and global health concerns may require a coordinated effort from educators in all scientific disciplines.

In this regard, the construct of science identity (Carlone and Johnson, 2007), which is also closely related to critical science agency (Calabrese Barton and Tan, 2010), constitutes an invaluable analytic lens, which is used by researchers worldwide to interpret, and potentially overcome, gender and ethnicity inequalities (Hazari et al, 2013) such as the gender gap in STEM higher education and scientific occupations.

This Special Issue “Science Education towards Sustainable Development Goals” welcomes contributions from a range of perspectives related to the role of science education in pursuit of the UN 2030 agenda sustainable development goals, and how this may necessitate a re-shaping and re-thinking of current science education. We welcome contributions from specialized educational research fields of all STEM disciplines, which aim to improve students’ conceptual understanding of the scientific bases of crucial social and environmental issues at all levels of education. More general research works which aim to improve our theoretical understanding of open problems in the relationship between education and science and assist with the development of critical awareness and activism relating to the sustainable development goals will also be considered.

Basu, S. J., Calabrese Barton, A., Clairmont, N., & Locke, D. (2009). Developing a framework for critical science agency through case study in a conceptual physics context. Cultural studies of science education, 4, 345-371.

Calabrese Barton, A, & Tan, E. (2010). We be burnin'! Agency, identity, and science learning. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 19(2), 187-229.

Carlone, H. B., & Johnson, A. (2007). Understanding the science experiences of successful women of color: Science identity as an analytic lens. Journal of Research in Science Teaching: The Official Journal of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, 44(8), 1187-1218.

Hazari, Z., Sadler, P. M., & Sonnert, G. (2013). The science identity of college students: Exploring the intersection of gender, race, and ethnicity. Journal of College Science Teaching, 42(5), 82-91.

Dr. Massimiliano Malgieri
Dr. Tommaso Rosi
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

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Keywords

  • UN 2030 agenda
  • science education
  • sustainability

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

14 pages, 257 KiB  
Article
Research on Integration of the Sustainable Development Goals and Teaching Practices in a Future Teacher Science Education Course
by Chen Guo, Ying Huang and Xiangdong Chen
Sustainability 2024, 16(12), 4982; https://doi.org/10.3390/su16124982 - 11 Jun 2024
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2574
Abstract
This study aims to investigate the levels of pedagogical competencies and ESD competencies in a group of future primary school teachers when integrating teaching practices and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into a science education course. Both quantitative and qualitative research approaches were [...] Read more.
This study aims to investigate the levels of pedagogical competencies and ESD competencies in a group of future primary school teachers when integrating teaching practices and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into a science education course. Both quantitative and qualitative research approaches were used. Eighty-eight of the student teachers demonstrated pedagogical and ESD competencies, as evidenced by the self-rated scores and course instructor-rated scores of their teaching practices which were collected and analyzed. In addition, the lesson plans designed by the student teachers were coded and scrutinized to identify their ESD-specific competencies related to designing primary science instruction. Furthermore, the student teachers responded to the questionnaires about their views and attitudes towards the integration of the SDGs and teaching practices. The findings reveal a difference between the participants’ self-rated scores and the instructor-rated scores for pedagogical competencies during the teaching practices, whereas the scores for general ESD competencies were closely aligned. Content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and motivation and value related to sustainable development and science education were well represented in the lesson plans, and the student teachers generally held a positive attitude towards the integration of the SDGs and teaching practices. This study offers practical insights into the effective integration of pertinent topics and knowledge regarding sustainable development into teacher education and science education curricula. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Science Education towards Sustainable Development Goals)
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