NOTE: For all queries and help, the Secretariat is located in TR714 (Block 7, ground floor)

Developing Critical Thinking through Socio-scientific Issues to Face Post-truth Challenges

My proposal is to support students' development of Critical Thinking (CT) in science education as a response to post-truth challenges, and I suggest doing so through work with socio-scientific issues. The practice of critical thinking assists students in fulfilling goals such as using appropriate criteria to evaluate information, distinguishing truth from post-truth and science from pseudoscience, and making decisions grounded in evidence and values. The proposal is framed in an approach to critical thinking oriented to action, towards educating critical citizens; a characterization of critical thinking (Jiménez-Aleixandre & Puig, 2022), which includes new components: a) the capacity to criticize inequitable discourses and structures, and to engage in critical action; and b) the capacity to develop independent opinions and to challenge socially established ideas; alongside c) the use of epistemic criteria in evidence evaluation; and d) the disposition to seek reasons and to evaluate the reliability of sources. The post-truth era (McIntyre, 2018) involves large scale diffusion of science denial and pseudo-scientific claims, sometimes endorsed by political leaders; thus, CT's dimension of purposeful judgment is relevant to judgments about post-truth. In this talk I address first, the shifts involved in our characterization of CT, from a focus on skills to a focus on practice; and from a narrower focus on cognitive skills to a wider focus including justice and critical action. We suggest that overcoming post-truth is linked to social justice. Second, I discuss three instances of post-truth about socio-scientific issues: global warming denial, racism –or the idea that everything is written in our genes– and denial of women's discrimination. My contention is that we need to hold up hope, against discourses from enterprises and capitalist forces that propagate the idea that nothing can be done to reverse climate change or racism: the future is in our hands.

Workshop: Bridging the Gap: Real World Problem Solving with Robotics and Applied Physics 

Presenter: Andy Lee

Synopsis: Ever felt the disconnect between science textbooks and the real world? This dynamic workshop will help bridge the gap between theoretical scientific concepts and practical applications through the exciting world of VEX Robotics.

In this session, you will:

• Gain hands-on experience with VEX Robotics, exploring its components and their functionalities.
• Delve into real-world engineering challenges, analysing scenarios where scientific principles play a crucial role.
• Uncover the exciting connection between physics and VEX robots:
  • Translate concepts like motion, forces, and energy into tangible applications through robot design and operation.
  • Utilize sensors and data analysis to gather real-time information and optimize robot performance based on scientific principles.
• Embrace the design thinking framework to tackle these challenges head-on, fostering critical thinking and creative problem-solving.
• Engage in a collaborative activity that requires applying scientific knowledge and building a VEX robot solution to address a specific real-world problem.
• Leave with a comprehensive toolkit, including project ideas, curriculum aligned to science standards, and practical strategies to implement this approach in your classroom.

This workshop is ideal for educators who:

• Want to enhance science education by making it relevant and engaging for students.
• Seek to bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application of scientific principles.
• Desire to equip students with the skills to approach real-world problems through the lens of science and engineering.

Participants will gain:

• A deeper understanding of how VEX Robotics serves as a powerful tool to apply scientific concepts to solve real-world challenges.
• Effective strategies to integrate key physics principles into VEX activities, fostering a deeper understanding of their practical applications.
• A framework for incorporating design thinking to address real-world engineering problems with a scientific foundation.
• Ready-to-use resources aligned with science standards for seamless classroom integration.

Empower your students to become the next generation of problem-solvers who can apply scientific knowledge to make a real-world impact!

Workshop: How is Water Quality Measurement done in the Industry and how it can be introduced into the classroom

Presenters: Eileen Koh and Kristin Goh

Synopsis: "Water is critical for sustainable development, including environmental integrity and the alleviation of poverty and hunger, and is indispensable for human health and well-being." - United Nations

We all understand that water quality measurement is important in industrial applications. Especially so in Food manufacturing and High-Tech farming (such as Aquaculture and Agriculture) industries whereby water plays a critical role in the process or is the key ingredient in the final product. But given that all these industries have very different requirements and standards, it is not possible to have a “one-size fit all” instrument that is able to meet all their needs. Hence manufacturers began to design a wide variety of water quality measurement instruments to better meet the different needs. In this workshop, we aim to explore the science behind water quality, the various instrumentation used in various industries and how to introduce them into the classroom.

The topics we will cover in this workshop are as follows:

(1) Basic review of the various water quality parameters

(2) Instruments used in Beer making

(3) Instruments used in High-Tech Agriculture farming

(4) Instruments used in High-Tech Aquaculture farming

(5) How to introduce Water Quality Measurement of various industrial applications into the classroom 

Science and Pseudoscience: Why Do People Trust them?

One of the biggest issues of the posthuman era is trust. The boundary between the real and the fake is unclear, and the unpredictability in a complex network system often leads to disaster. Ultimately, these come down to the question of how we can and cannot trust science. One of the goals of science education has been to help people trust the knowledge structure and inquiry activities of science. However, modern people sometimes have skepticism over the way how science works and often rely more on something other than science. This presentation will examine the reasons why people do and do not trust science and pseudoscience, by expanding the discussion over the results of a previous study on why Korean adults with a fairly high level of education came to trust things that fall outside the scope of orthodox science, such as acupuncture and the four pillars of destiny (FPD) (Song, Chun, & Na, 2021). The data and the discussion are deeply connected to the cores of science education: the uncertain nature of science, the demarcation between science and non-science, nature of science, conspiracy theories and science denials, and further the boundaries of science education. In a future society increasingly dominated by AI, the issue of science and trust will become more serious and may demand a fundamental change of our concepts of trust as well as of science.

Workshop: Using Data to Drive Science Exploration (LEGO Education with Databot)

Presenter(s): Ali Asghar and Joel Heng

Synopsis: In our upcoming workshop, we will delve into the fascinating world of STEM education with the integration of two innovative tools: Databot and LEGO Education BrickQ Motion Prime. Databot, equipped with a variety of sensors including accelerometers, oxygen level counters, and CO2 measurers, serves as a versatile instrument for real-world data collection. On the other hand, LEGO Education BrickQ Motion Prime focuses on physical sciences with lessons centered around sports themes, providing hands-on learning experiences for students.

During the workshop, educators will engage in two enriching projects aimed at exploring the capabilities of these tools. Firstly, participants will embark on the creation of Land Yachts, propelled by strong gusts of air generated by the teachers themselves. Equipped with Databot, these yachts will enable educators to track acceleration, facilitating comparisons of speeds and acceleration among different designs. Subsequently, teachers will participate in a thrilling race, putting their creations to the test and applying concepts of motion and force in real-time.

In the second project, educators will delve into the realm of biomechanics as they construct Gymnasts capable of swinging back and forth on horizontal bars. Leveraging Databot's accelerometer and gyro-sensors, teachers will chart acceleration and forces during the swinging action, providing valuable insights into the physics of motion. Armed with this data, educators will be challenged to formulate hypotheses and design experiments to either prove or disprove their conjectures, fostering critical thinking and scientific inquiry among participants.

Throughout the workshop, educators will be guided by the principles of the QUACK methodology—an innovative pedagogical approach developed by Duck Learning. Rooted in the belief that learning should be engaging and experiential, QUACK emphasizes maximum engagement and 'learning through play' to cultivate deep conceptual understanding among students. By seamlessly integrating Databot, LEGO Education BrickQ Motion Prime, and the QUACK methodology, educators will not only enrich their teaching practice but also empower students to become active participants in their learning journey.

In conclusion, our workshop offers educators a unique opportunity to explore the synergies between cutting-edge technology, hands-on experimentation, and innovative pedagogy. By immersing themselves in the creation of Land Yachts and Gymnasts, educators will gain practical insights into integrating Databot and LEGO Education BrickQ Motion Prime into their STEM curriculum. Moreover, the adoption of the QUACK methodology ensures that learning remains engaging, meaningful, and impactful for students. Join us as we embark on a transformative journey towards inspiring the next generation of STEM innovators.

Workshop: Networking Interfaces for Digital STEM Education

Presenter: Dr. Andreas Kastner

Synopsis:  Digital technology is meanwhile widely used for teaching – anyhow in most cases only in an one-dimensional way: digital documents are replacing books, instead of writing on a paper it is writing on a tablet, instead of connecting a device via USB you connect now via Bluetooth. The many additional advantages are rarely used. One possible advantage – networking interfaces – should be viewed under different perspectives:

1.         Preparation of a cloud-based teaching unit which combines different digital (but also analogue) technologies together – including networking devices. The used worksheets are bidirectional, i.e. they can configure the device for the experiment already and also they can record the data directly into the worksheet, where there are exactly the tools prepared, which are needed for evaluation of the data.

2.         Networking interfaces from the view of the teacher: the teacher has always the view to all interfaces at the same time. He/she has the possibility to assist the student individually directly from his workstation, which could be a PC, a tablet or just his mobile phone. After the experiment he can collect and compare the measurements of the different groups and discuss about the results. By selecting different parameters for each group physical laws can be impressively demonstrated.

3.         Networking interfaces from the view of the students: in current technologies one interface can deliver its data only to one device – either via USB or Bluetooth. Networking interfaces can share measurement results to a whole group of students. So even a group of students is working with the same equipment, everybody in the group has the possibility of an individual evaluation and interpretation of the measured data. So the important soft skill of teamwork is combined with an individual evaluation of each student.

All this functionality is embedded in an open system, which allows sharing teaching units between the teachers. It is also possible to network teaching institutes together and organize equipment in a cost-efficient way or implement experiments within curricula as teaching units in a very fast way.

LD Didactic GmbH digital teaching solutions link laboratory equipment, experimental manuals, content management experiment preparation, experiment execution and evaluation to one platform with the use of networking interfaces.

Science education and the richness of human social life

Many of the most common responses to misinformation and the post-truth era are built on misunderstandings about the social and institutional nature of scientific work and the social conditions under which non-scientists make sense of science. This presentation explores how understanding the richly social nature of scientific work – and human life more generally – might help us develop science education strategies that support the fruitful integration of science into complex and plural societies. The core of the talk focuses on three ideas: competent outsiders, epistemic networks, and appropriate respect. Each idea responds to broad assumptions in science education: the assumption that “thinking like scientists” is useful outside of scientific practice, the assumption that people do (or should) try to make sense of science on their own, and the assumption that “trust in science” is a simple and unambiguous good. Drawing on theories and findings from sociology and the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies, I argue that public engagement with science plays out in a social world that is full of alliances, commitments, and connections, populated by organizations and institutions as well as people and ideas. Although it seems improvised in the moment, public engagement with science is informed by histories and experiences that we cannot (and should not) ignore.

Workshop: Zeiss Microscopy Digital Classroom

Presenter: Fhu Chee Kong

Synopsis: Whenever you are considering to buy new school equipment, count on a digital classroom. An interactive digital classroom helps to produce the engaging atmosphere that motivates students to discover their field of study and to reach their learning goals.

With ZEISS microscopes and the imaging app Labscope, it is easy to create a digital classroom with a network of connected school microscopes. You can now monitor all student microscopes from your iPad or iPhone. Get students’ awareness by interactively involving them in your teaching. Students gain by learning success in a playful way and have fun in your training session by sharing their microscope images in their networks.

Tools for Educating in Science to Mitigate Harm in the Post-Truth Era

The burgeoning of untruth, especially in science, is directly related to our limited capacity as humans to understand, regulate, and harness the flow of data. As the availability and complexity of data expands, it becomes harder for human beings to differentiate fact from rumor, certainty from speculation, and science from science fiction. Because the major aim of science is to improve the human condition, scientists can now only mitigate the harm of untruth if we contribute to safeguarding the future of the human race and the planet. Fortunately, science education can place tools for mitigation in the control of people. The urgent problem is how to educate for this mitigation. This presentation provides a framework for science educators to do just that. Drawing upon benefits-costs-risks thinking in chemistry, as well as from theoretical perspectives on decision theory in economics, this presentation will examine empirical findings on risk perception and assessment, scientific argumentation, cost-benefit analysis, and mitigation of risk in food science and chemical toxicology. Four principles will serve as a lens: (1) We have an ethical imperative to educate; (2) We have a moral imperative to care for each other; (3) Our connected world requires globalized thinking and local action; and (4) Honoring different ways of knowing is the key to building human capacity to synthesize information. This presentation concludes by describing how we, as science educators, can use these guiding principles to provide humanity with better tools for mitigating harm to reduce risk, and why humanity needs more science education, not less, if we are to prepare for the risky uncertain future inherent in a post-truth era.

Does Science Education need (more) Powerful Knowledge?

This presentation examines a recent major curriculum initiative from the UK to restore the role of knowledge as an entitlement, personal fulfilment, and human right for all learners—Powerful Knowledge (PK). The latter emphasises learning of specialised concepts as well as knowledge-building from the disciplines that are typically found within school subjects, but are largely absent from everyday experiences. I share my thoughts regarding areas where science educators may find resonance with PK ideas, and where our largely divergent trajectories will also continue their separate ways.

Closing Ceremony

This keynote will be followed by a short Closing Ceremony. The ISEC 2024 Best Paper Award will be announced!  

Post-conference Workshop by Keynote Speaker Marilar Jiménez-Aleixandre (7A-01-06) [Ticketed]

Embedding Conflict in Task Design to Promote Critical Thinking

To face post-truth challenges, I propose –as one of educational strategies– the development of Critical Thinking (CT). The focus of the workshop is on the features of task –and teaching sequences– design that promote critical thinking and argumentation. I suggest that there is a need for revealing conflicts at the heart of socio-scientific issues (Jiménez-Aleixandre et al., 2019). My standpoint is that to face post-truth challenges it is necessary to acknowledge the inherent complexity of issues such as global warming –I prefer that term over climate change– racism or sexism. Building public discourses against denial and taking actions to stop global warming involve conflicts, both social –within structural dimensions of the issue– and personal –as with lifestyle. Thus, for instance, the benefits of reducing the meat in diets prevalent in Western countries, for the environment –greenhouse effect–, animal welfare and human health may conflict with economic interests and with cultural habits and values. Changing diets could also entail personal conflicts.

The approach draws from Barzilai and Chinn's (2020) work about educational responses to post-truth, in particular three of their educational lenses to address it: 1) Not knowing how to know, how to critically deal with information; 2) Fallible ways of knowing, cognitive biases and limitations; and 3) Disagreeing about how to know, a loss of shared epistemology.

The objectives of the workshop are:– To discuss the meaning of post-truth, in terms of threats to students' and public's capacity to engage in knowledge evaluation, and its impact on science education.– To engage in two embedding-conflict tasks, about global warming, and racism, designed to promote critical thinking and the use of appropriate criteria to evaluate information.– To identify, in the participants' contexts, scientific issues that may be used as topics for building embedding-conflict tasks.

Here is a related reading that you might be interested in: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi8227

Post-conference Workshop by Keynote Speaker Jinwoong Song (TR705) [Ticketed]

(Un)certainty of science: what and how should we deal with it?

In the 21st century, we live in a risk society and the trust in science is being challenged. The belief that science will provide accurate future predictions or the definitive solutions of problems has been shaken, and people's expectations are now shifting to artificial intelligence (AI). In fact, this widespread public disappointment with science stems from a misunderstanding of the (un)certainty of science. In school education, we have placed too much emphasis on the certainty of science. While there was a strong emphasis on the usefulness of established scientific knowledge for known problems, it was less honest about the uncertainty inherent in the process of scientific inquiry into new problems. The core of trust must lie in the 'certain uncertainty of science.' In other words, although science cannot provide definite answers to new and unknown problems, it must be understood that scientific practice has an efficient system in place to minimize the intrinsic uncertainty. And it is necessary to emphasize that this is the most important core of science and the basis of trust. In this workshop, we will discuss (1) how science curriculum and science textbooks deal with (un)certainty in science, (2) what (un)certainties are in scientific knowledge and inquiry processes, and (3) how to deal with such (un)certainty preferably. The workshop participants are expected to share their experiences and opinions as science educators.

Post-conference Workshop by Keynote Speaker Noah Weeth Feinstein (7A-01-07) [Ticketed]

Science education and the richness of human social life: Exploring the implications for teaching

In this workshop, we will draw on the knowledge and contexts of workshop participants to examine how richly social understandings of science and human life can alter our approach to science education. The overall goal is to shift our frame of reference away from the canonical goals of science education and toward the complex, richly social work of public engagement with science.

First, we will establish a common conceptual foundation by examining our own experiences as competent outsiders in different cultural contexts during the global COVID-19 pandemic. We will map our own encounters with science onto the science curricula in our various teaching contexts and evaluate where familiar forms of science education do and do not prepare us for authentic public engagement.

Second, we will use concrete problem situations (some pre-determined, some from our shared experience) to examine how people use epistemic networks to find, interpret, and act on science-related knowledge in personal and civic contexts. We will contrast these problem situations (and the socially varied strategies we use to address them) with the narrower, more individualistic problem situations that characterize school-based science education and examine how and when it is possible to encourage prudent use of epistemic networks within school-based science education.

Third and finally, we will explore what it means to have appropriate respect for science. This will require us to examine the institutional, political, and historical contexts that shape how different people encounter science, and contrast the clear, unambiguous answers that characterize school-based science with the messy, ambivalent, “good enough” compromises we are often forced to make in life outside of school. We will conclude by considering how and when it is possible to introduce a more nuanced and relational idea of respect for science in school.

Post-conference Workshop by Keynote Speaker Hannah Sevian (TR702) [Ticketed]

Post-Truth Science Armor as a Curriculum Emphasis

The major aim of science is to improve the human condition. However, due to the burgeoning of untruth, especially in science, we now face an urgent problem to mitigate the harm of untruth by arming students with tools to differentiate fact from rumor, certainty from speculation, and science from science fiction. This workshop centers four principles: (1) We have an ethical imperative to educate; (2) We have a moral imperative to care for each other; (3) Our connected world requires globalized thinking and local action; and (4) Honoring different ways of knowing is the key to building human capacity to synthesize information. The workshop will offer practical guidance for curricular renewal and the design of educational activity through the lens of a newly proposed curriculum emphasis based on these principles, called Post-truth Science Armor. A curriculum emphasis is “a coherent set of meta-messages… constitut[ing] objectives which go beyond learning the facts, principles, laws, and theories of the subject matter itself – objectives which provide answers to the student question: ‘Why am I learning this?’” (Roberts, 1982, p. 245) The principles will guide our use of tools drawn from research on risk perception and assessment, scientific argumentation, cost-benefit analysis, and mitigation of risk to examine and critique data and claims, and to develop students’ post-truth science differentiation capacities. The overarching goal of the workshop is to offer practical resources for updating secondary and tertiary science education to address the risky uncertain future inherent in our post-truth era. The objectives of the workshop are to: (1) Recognize different curriculum emphases in learning activities, (2) Practice using tools that increase learners’ capacity to face and address post-truth science in a learning activity designed with a Post-Truth Science Armor curriculum emphasis, and (3) Generate actionable steps toward re-envisioning science learning experiences to mitigate the harm of untruth.