Sakari Tolppanen

Toward citizenship science education : what students do to make the world a better place?

ABSTRACT With increased focus on sustainability and socioscientific issues, dealing with issues related to citizenship is now seen as an important element of science education. However, in order to make the world a better place, mere understanding about socioscientific issues is not enough. Action must also be taken. In this study, 35 international gifted students—potential scientists—aged 15–19 were interviewed to investigate what they were doing to make the world a better place. The interviews were analyzed using qualitative content analysis with focus on students’ actions toward a better world, their rationalizations for such actions, and the role of science in the rationalizations. The analysis shows that students consciously take a wide range of actions, and that they see citizenship as a process of constant self-development. The three categories created to highlight the variation in the ways students take action were personally responsible actions, participatory actions, and preparing for future. Although many students saw that science and scientists play a big role in solving especially the environmental problems, most of them also discussed the structural causes for problems, as well as the interplay of social, economic, and political forces. The results indicate that citizenship science education should take the variety of students’ actions into consideration, give students the possibility to take individual and participatory action, as well as give students opportunities to get to know and discuss the ways a career in science or engineering can contribute to saving the world.

The potential of the non-formal educational sector for supporting chemistry learning and sustainability education for all students – a joint perspective from two cases in Finland and Germany

Non-formal education has been suggested as becoming more and more important in the last decades. As the aims of non-formal education are broad and diverse, a large variety of non-formal learning activities is available. One of the emerging fields in many countries, among them Finland and Germany, has been the establishment of non-formal laboratory learning environments. These laboratories were established in universities and research institutes to aim at enriching opportunities for primary and secondary school students to do more and more intense practical work, e.g. in chemistry. The primary rationale of these laboratories, in the beginning, was mainly to raise students’ interest in the fields of science and engineering, possibly inspiring them to pursue a career in these fields. However, recently the movement has started offering more programs aiming at all learners, but especially those students who are sometimes neglected in traditional science education in the formal sector. A focus on all learners is suggested to help raise students’ level of scientific literacy when connecting practical science learning with the societal and environmental perspectives of science. Chemistry learning connected to sustainability issues offers many contemporary topics that are often not yet part of the chemistry formal curriculum but can easily form contexts for non-formal learning. Because of its flexible character, non-formal education can help implementing aspects of sustainability into chemistry education and also can take a gander at the growing heterogeneity of todays students. This paper derives a joint perspective from two non-formal chemistry education initiatives from Finland and Germany focusing education for sustainability for both talented and educationally disadvantaged students in the foreground of a more general perspective on non-formal and sustainability education in chemistry.

Relevance of Non-Formal Education in Science Education

In the past decade there have been numerous studies that have indicated that mathematics and science education is unpopular among youth (Osborne, Simon, & Collins, 2003). Researchers believe that one of the reasons behind this is that the youth often see science education as irrelevant to their everyday lives and to society (Gilbert, 2006).

Effectiveness of a Lesson on Multimodal Writing

This chapter describes a study that aimed to investigate how a multimodal writing lesson impacted student learning of 13 to 14-year-old students in a science class. The research described in this chapter addresses the following research questions: (i) how does a lesson on multimodal writing affect students’ text production and use of alternative modes of representation in the development of a written product communicating about science concepts, (ii) is there a gender difference in the characteristics of multimodal writing, and (iii) how do different lesson structures affect students’ ability to use multimodal writing. The principles of effective writing-to-learn lessons were implemented in science classrooms and the written products of 98 science students from three different schools were analyzed. Of these 98 students, 54 were given a lesson on multimodal writing prior to being assigned the task of creating a multimodal product, while 44 students were in a control group that did not receive instruction on multimodal writing before assignment of the task. Content analysis of the student products indicated that a single lesson on multimodal writing did not affect students’ overall text production, but students in the test group did use more alternative modes than students in the control group. This difference in quantity was not shown to affect the quality of the end products. A significant difference in the characteristics of multimodal writing was seen between genders, with females outperforming males when multimodal products were evaluated for effectiveness. Although some differences in lesson structures were noted across the study, evidence on their effect on learning is preliminary at best. In conclusion, the findings suggest that a single lesson on multimodal writing is not enough for students to understand how to effectively develop multimodal writing products as a way to communicate about science concepts, but that good general writing skills benefit students in transferring from traditional writing to multimodal writing.

The International Millennium Youth Camp as an Active Learning Ecosystem for Future Scientists

Once a year, the LUMA (STEM) Education Center of the University of Helsinki, Technology Academy Finland and Aalto University, organizes a popular international STEM education camp in Helsinki in collaboration with some organizations and global industrial companies. The camp is aimed at gifted youth –possible future scientists – and more than a thousand 16- to 19-year-old students apply from over a hundred countries.