Environmental education is a key factor in helping individuals become eco-friendly, particularly in terms of how to deal with the waste they produce. Therefore, the main aim of the study is to examine the effectiveness of the environmental excellence program (EEP) in improving fourth-grade students’ knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors towards waste management. The EEP adopted a one-group quasi-experimental design using pre-post application. The study was performed with a sample of 187 students (83 males and 104 females) selected from three schools from one Educational Governorate in the Sultanate of Oman. The knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of the students towards the waste management scale (SKABWMS) were used for data collection. Study findings revealed that there are significant differences between pre and post applications of the SKABWMS in students’ knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors in favor of post-application. In addition, the results showed that female students developed better behaviors than male students after taking part in the EEP. In light of these results, suggestions and recommendations were made in this study to improve the EEP implementation in schools, in its latest version.

There have been recent calls for students to not only learn the content of science, but also its practices. If teachers are to teach their students how to engage in those practice, then they need to have at least had some experience engaging in them. The US NSF research experiences for the teachers (RET) programs provide opportunities for the teachers to engage in those practices. In those programs, the teachers work in research groups that vary in the ways in which they are structured. This suggests they might gain different experiences depending on their research groups even if the teachers participate in the same program. Because of this reason, in this study we aimed to find out how participating in differently structured research groups influence preservice teachers’ abilities to engage in science practices. By using a comparative case study approach, we compared two preservice science teachers’ experiences and abilities in an RET program that required teachers to engage in research projects. Analysis of data from preservice teacher and graduate student mentor surveys and interviews, and observation notes indicated that the preservice teacher who participated in a loosely structured research group did not have the opportunity to improve in most of the practices and left the program as a novice researcher. On the other hand, the preservice teacher who participated in a tightly structured research group improved in most of the practices and to being a proficient technician.

Urban community gardens are often home to a variety of environmental education programs. One such program centered in a community garden is the Youth Internship Program created by The Green Thumb Project. Through mixed methods techniques and a case study approach, the Youth Internship Program’s immediate outcomes were evaluated by assessing 12 participants’ changes in career preparedness skills, healthy living attitudes, and content knowledge after participating in the eight-week long curriculum. Outcomes were assessed through the lens of situated learning theory and its relation to place-based environmental education. Through analysis of the quantitative and qualitative data, results indicated that the Youth Internship Program was effective in positively changing all interns’ skills, attitudes, and knowledge. Linear regressions showed that skills, attitudes, and knowledge had significant positive relationships with one another. This finding indicated that the themes were interconnected and that learning gains in one area helped interns experience gains in another area. Overall, the data demonstrated that the program was effective in helping interns grow personally, professionally, and academically.

Incorporating STS-based instruction in K-12, particularly, elementary classrooms, is contingent upon proper preparation of a teaching force that understands STS issues and is well equipped to focus instruction on such issues. It is, therefore, imperative that teacher beliefs, attitude, and understanding of STS issues and STS-focused instruction are considered and addressed during teacher education programs and particularly methods courses. The purpose of the current case study was to examine a small group of elementary pre-service teachers’ experiences and reflection on the STS component of a science methods course, pre and post environmental literacy, views and attitude toward STS issues and instruction, and how their experiences influenced their views and attitudes. The results of this study are promising and allow us to examine the experiences and perceptions of individual students. All five participants who began the course with minimal knowledge of STS issues and little to no confidence or willingness to teach about STS issues, ended the course with a greater understanding of STS issues, skills to deal with and teach STS issues, and willingness to take action and incorporate STS-based instruction. The study’s participants suggested that multiple aspects of the exploratory and STS-focused course allowed for them to rethink some of their previous ideas, gain a deep understanding of STS issues, and become equipped to take action and also incorporate STS-based instruction into their future classrooms.

The present study aims to design an instruction that engages nature of science (NOS) and nature of the sciences (NOTSs) learning objectives with the teaching and learning of a core biological concept or ‘big’ idea, namely homeostasis. The design process involves choices regarding what NOS and NOTSs aspects are to be taught, while the formulation of these aspects is in accordance with science-content learning objectives, such as the understanding of definitional features of homeostasis and human thermoregulatory mechanisms, and difficulties that students face in accomplishing these objectives. Through NOS and NOTSs learning objectives, students are expected to be informed of (a) the theory-laden character of scientific knowledge, (b) the hierarchical organization of primary ontological levels, (c) a model focusing on aspects of biological causality (d) definitional and accompanying features of the notion of mechanism, and (e) how to search for finding mechanisms including the interrelation of structure and function. Moreover, students are instructed in elaborating on their causal reasoning through a model and a metaphor (e.g., air-condition) when considering human thermoregulatory mechanisms. The potential benefits of the teaching of all these items to students’ understanding of homeostasis are also discussed.

Along with the trend emphasizing ID learning, ID assessments to measure students’ ID understanding have been developed by several scholars. The interdisciplinary science assessment for carbon cycling (ISACC) was developed to assess ID understanding among high school and college students in integrating knowledge from different science disciplines to explain a scientific phenomenon, global carbon cycling. The ISACC’s construct validity was checked using traditional item response theory (IRT) models in 2021. The current study was motivated by the desire to reveal the difference in IRT analysis results of the ISACC using a Bayesian approach in comparison with the results using the traditional approach. The Bayesian approach has several strengths over the traditional IRT. The results of the study imply the need for additional research for the development and validation of interdisciplinary science assessments through strong psychometric properties.

This text is a short overview of the Sustainable Globe Conference 2021, the special issue of the International of Environmental and Science Education and new challenges for the idea of sustainability and its education.

Essentialism is a way of reasoning that implies assuming that the members of a group share an immutable essence, and that the variation among the members of the group is negligible. Although this way of reasoning is useful for people in their everyday lives, it may pose difficulties in the learning of scientific models, particularly those of evolutionary biology. Essentialism, understood as an epistemological obstacle, requires some didactic work encouraging the development of metacognitive vigilance, in other words, the awareness and regulation of this way of thinking. In this article, we will characterize the processes of metacognitive regulation of essentialism that took place during a didactic sequence to teach evolution. The sequence was implemented in a secondary school in Argentina with 80 students. We will present some of the possibilities and difficulties of carrying out metacognitive regulation of essentialism in biology classrooms. From the use of thematic analysis, we have found that students seem to regulate essentialism in an implicit way during discussions with their classmates, at both the individual and social levels. Moreover, in the case of evolution learning, we distinguished two types of specific regulations: the regulation of ‘typologism’ and that of ‘noise’. In this sense, we consider that essentialism is not regulated as a whole, but instead through some of its assumptions. This work will allow further thinking about the possibilities of promoting the metacognitive regulation of epistemological obstacles in biology classes.

Cultural diversity is important in understanding human-nature relationships and suggesting ways to change them in the face of environmental crises. Therefore, it is important to examine how environmental education (EE) and education for sustainable development (ESD) consider cultural inclusion. The debate between different visions related to humanity, society, nature, the environment, the relationship between humans and the rest of nature, development, growth, etc. opens the spectrum to study cultural inclusion. This editorial briefly overviews how EE and ESD address cultural inclusion. This overview places such a debate as the basis of this special issue (SI) of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Environmental and Science Education (IJESE). Most of the papers in this SI are expanded and peer-reviewed versions of conferences presented at the Sustainable Globe Conference 2021. The papers highlight sustainability problems in different scenarios, propose alternative viewpoints to what sustainability or ESD establish, and use diverse methods for producing knowledge.

The purpose of this mixed methods concurrent triangulation study was to assess the vocational relevancy of adventure STEM for sixth grade students attending the Science Adventure School (SAS), a residential, informal education program focused on delivering adventure STEM education to low-income, rural students. Specifically, this study sought to research any changes in STEM attitudes, including science interest (Eccles, 2007; Gilmartin et al., 2007) and science career interest (Sadler et al., 2011) as a result of participating in SAS. In the quantitative phase of the study, curriculum relevancy and STEM attitudes were assessed with a pre- and post- adventure STEM experience survey. The qualitative portion of the study consisted of semi-structured in-person interviews with 14 students and eight teachers shortly after their SAS experience to gain additional insights into the results of the statistical analysis and identify how students and teachers see the relevancy of adventure STEM curriculum. This study’s findings add to the body of adventure STEM literature and lends support to the positive benefits of engaging youth in adventure STEM programming.