Developing students’ ability to engage critically with science in the news: identifying elements of the ‘media awareness’ dimension

Worldwide, science education reform movements are stressing the need to promote ‘scienti?c literacy’ among young people. Increasingly, this is taken to include empowering students to engage critically with science-related news reporting. Despite this requirement now featuring in statutory curricula throughout the UK, there has, to date, been a dearth of research-informed advice to assist science teachers as they identify appropriate instructional objectives in this regard and design relevant learning activities through which these might be achieved. In this study, prominent science communication
scholars, science journalists, science educators and media educators were interviewed to determine what knowledge, skills and habits of mind they judged valuable for individuals reading science-related news stories. Teachers of science and of English from nine secondary schools in Northern Ireland addressed the same issue. A striking – and signi?cant – ?nding of the study was the very substantial number of statements of knowledge, skill and disposition o?ered by participants that relate to ‘media awareness’, an issue largely overlooked in the science education literature. The school-focused phase of the research suggests that cross-curricular approaches involving teachers of science collaborating with those of English/media education or media studies may best serve to address this important curricular goal.

The Critical Reading of the Images Associated with Science-Related News Reports: Establishing a knowledge, skills, and attitudes framework

For the majority of adults, the media constitute their main source of information about science and science-related matters impacting on society. To help prepare young people to engage with science in the media, teachers are being exhorted to equip their students with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to respond critically to science-related news reports. Typically, such reports comprise not only text, but also visual elements. These images are not simply adjuncts to the written word; they are integral to meaning-making. Though science teachers make considerable use of newspaper images, they tend to view these representations unproblematically, underestimating their potential ambiguity, complexity, and role in framing media messages. They rarely aim to develop students’ ability to ‘read’, critically, such graphics. Moreover, research into how this might be achieved is limited and, consequently, research-informed guidance which could support this instruction is lacking. This paper describes a study designed to formulate a framework for such teaching. Science communication scholars, science journalists and media educators with acknowledged relevant expertise were surveyed to ascertain what knowledge, skills, and attitudes they deemed useful to engagement with science related news images. Their proposals were recast as learning intentions (instructional objectives), and science and English teachers collaborated to suggest which could be addressed with secondary school students and the age group best suited to their introduction. The outcome is an inventory of learning intentions on which teachers could draw to support their planning of instructional sequences aimed at developing students’ criticality in respect of the totality of science news reports.

Children’s perceptions of primary science assessment in England and Wales

This study builds on and contributes to work on assessment of children in primary school, particularly in science. Previous research has examined primary science assessment from different standpoints, but no studies have speci?cally addressed children’s perspectives. This article provides additional insight into issues surrounding children’s assessment in primary school and how the assessment of science might develop in England after the science SATs (Standard Assessment Tests) were abolished in 2009. Some research suggests that primary science assessment via SATs is a major reason for the observed decline in children’s engagement with science in upper primary and lower secondary school. The analytic focus on engaging children as coresearchers to assist in the process of gathering informed views and interpreting ?ndings from a large sample of children’s views enables another contribution. The study, based on a survey of 1000 children in primary and secondary schools in England and Wales, reveals that despite being assessed under two different regimes (high-stakes national tests in England and moderated teacher assessment in Wales), children’s views of science assessment are remarkably consistent. Most appreciate the usefulness of science assessment and value frequent, non-SATs testing for monitoring/improving science progress. There was a largely negative impact, however, of science
assessment on children’s well-being, particularly due to stress. The paper demonstrates that children provide an important perspective on assessment and that including their views can improve policy-making in relation to primary science assessment.

Racism and young girls' peer group relations: the experiences of South Asian girls

This article draws upon data from an indepth ethnographic study of five- and six-year-old children in an English multi-ethnic, inner city primary school. It focuses on the significance of ‘race’ within young girls’ peer group relations and the ways in which the social dynamics that underlie those relations provide the context for understanding the particular nature and form that racism takes among the girls. This is done through a focus on the experiences of South Asian girls within the group. Within this, the article has two main aims. First, it aims to contribute to the literature within the sociology of education by extending the existing research focus on racism within teacher/pupil interactions to include an understanding of racism as it manifests itself among the children’s peer-group relations. Second, in adapting and applying Pierre Boudieu’s concepts of capital and field, the article also offers a contribution to the literature within the sociology of ‘race’ and ethnicity by suggesting one potentially fruitful way in which racism can be understood within specific social contexts.

'Mining money': science, legal technologies & working the borderlands of global finance

This paper explores the roles of science and market devices in the commodification of ‘nature’ and the configuration of flows of speculative capital. It focuses on mineral prospecting and the market for shares in ‘junior’ mining companies. In recent years these companies have expanded the reach of their exploration activities overseas, taking advantage of innovations in exploration methodologies and the liberalisation of fiscal and property regimes in ‘emerging’ mineral rich developing countries. Recent literature has explored how the reconfiguration of notions of ‘risk’ has structured the uneven distribution of rents. It is increasingly evident that neoliberal framing of environmental, political, social and economic risks has set in motion overflows that multinational mining capital had not bargained for (e.g. nationalisation, violence and political resistance). However, the role of ‘geological risk’ in animating flows of mining finance is often assumed as a ‘technical’ given. Yet geological knowledge claims, translated locally, designed to travel globally, assemble heterogeneous elements within distanciated regimes of metrology, valuation and commodity production. This paper explores how knowledge of nature is enrolled within systems of property relations, focusing on the genealogy of the knowledge practices that animate contemporary circuits of speculative mining finance. It argues that the financing of mineral prospecting mobilises pragmatic and situated forms of knowledge rather than actuarially driven calculations that promise predictability. A Canadian public enquiry struck in the wake of scandal associated with Bre-X’s prospecting activities in Indonesia is used to glean insights into the ways in which the construction of a system of public warrant to underpin financial speculation is predicated upon particular subjectivities and the outworking of everyday practices and struggles over ‘value’. Reflection on practical investments in processes of standardisation, rituals of verification and systems of accreditation reveal much about how the materiality of things shape the ways in which regional and global financial circuits are integrated, selectively transforming existing social relations and forms of knowledge production.

DONUTS: A Science Frame Autoguiding Algorithm with Sub-Pixel Precision, Capable of Guiding on Defocused Stars

We present the DONUTS autoguiding algorithm, designed to fix stellar positions at the sub-pixel level for high-cadence time-series photometry, and also capable of autoguiding on defocused stars. DONUTS was designed to calculate guide corrections from a series of science images and recentre telescope pointing between each exposure. The algorithm has the unique ability of calculating guide corrections from undersampled to heavily defocused point spread functions. We present the case for why such an algorithm is important for high precision photometry and give our results from off and on-sky testing. We discuss the limitations of DONUTS and the facilities where it soon will be deployed.

Invaders, Launchpads and Hybrids: The Importance of Transmediality in British Science Fiction Film in the 1950s

With its origins in the trick films of the 1890s and early 1900s, British science fiction film has a long history. While Things to Come (1936) is often identified as significant for being written by H.G.Wells, one of the fathers of science fiction as a genre, the importance of the interactions between media in the development of British science fiction film are often set aside. This chapter examines the importance of broadcast media to film-making in Britain, focusing on the 1950s as a period often valourised in writings about American science fiction, to the detriment of other national expressions of the genre. This period is key to the development of the genre in Britain, however, with the establishment of television as a popular medium incorporating the development of domestic science fiction television alongside the import of American products, together with the spread of the very term ‘science fiction’ through books, pulps and comics as well as radio, television and cinema. It was also the time of a backlash against the perceived threat of American soft cultural power embodied in the attractive shine of science fiction with its promise of a bright technological future. In particular, this chapter examines the significance of the relationship between the BBC television and radio services and the film production company Hammer, which was responsible for multiple adaptations of BBC properties, including a number of science fiction texts. The Hammer adaptation of the television serial The Quatermass Experiment proved to be the first major success for the company, moving it towards its most famous identity as producer of horror texts, though often horror with an underlying scientific element, as with their successful series of Frankenstein films. This chapter thus argues that the interaction between film and broadcast media in relation to science fiction was crucial at this historical juncture, not only in helping promote the identities of filmmakers like Hammer, but also in supporting the identity of the BBC and its properties, and in acting as a nexus for the then current debates on taste and national identity.

Architecture and health care: a place for sociology.

Sociologists of health and illness have tended to overlook the architecture and buildings used in health care. This contrasts with medical geographers who have yielded a body of work on the significance of places and spaces in the experience of health and illness. A review of sociological studies of the role of the built environment in the performance of medical practice uncovers an important vein of work, worthy of further study. Through the historically situated example of hospital architecture, this article seeks to tease out substantive and methodological issues that can inform a distinctive sociology of healthcare architecture. Contemporary healthcare buildings manifest design models developed for hotels, shopping malls and homes. These design features are congruent with neoliberal forms of subjectivity in which patients are constituted as consumers and responsibilised citizens. We conclude that an adequate sociology of healthcare architecture necessitates an appreciation of both the construction and experience of buildings, exploring the briefs and plans of their designers, and observing their everyday uses. Combining approaches and methods from the sociology of health and illness and science and technology studies offers potential for a novel research agenda that takes healthcare buildings as its substantive focus.

Equipping young people to engage with media driven science experiences: beyond science knowledge to science literacy and discerning consumers of news.

This paper reports on a study of a curricular intervention for pupils (age 10-13 years) in the UK aimed at supporting critical engagement with science based media reports. In particular the study focused on core elements of knowledge, skills and attitudes identified in previous studies that characterize critical consumers of science presented as news. This was an empirical study based on classroom observation. Data included responses from individual pupils, in addition video recording of group activity and intentional conversations between pupils and teachers were scrutinised. Analysis focused on core tasks relating to different elements of critical reading. Pupils demonstrated a grasp of questioning and evaluating text, however the capacity to translate this experience in support of a critical response to a media report with a science component is limited in assessing the credibility of text and as an element in critical reading.