David C. Owens

University of Montana | UMT · Teaching & Learning

The goals of science education must be sufficiently broad to support learners navigating changing scientific, social, and media landscapes. This position paper builds upon existing scholarship to articulate a set of constructs useful for navigating the modern information landscape including constructs with a long history in science education (e.g.,...

Socio‐scientific issues (SSI) instruction positions the understanding and practice of science in the context of issues that are informed by science but require reasoning about their societal dimensions to respond to those issues effectively. For this reason, instruction in the context of SSI has been considered the gateway to contemporary visions o...

The United States National Science and Technology Council has made a call for improving STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education at the convergence of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The National Science Foundation (NSF) views convergence as the merging of ideas, approaches, and technologies from widely...

As the coronavirus pandemic unfolded, the use of the term “Chinavirus” to refer to the virus that causes COVID-19 had societal consequences, resulting in discrimination against individuals of Asian descent. In this study of the language used when talking about COVID-19, we used an emergent thematic analysis to explore the potential for induced pers...

Terrestrial invertebrates are important subsidies to fish diets, though their seasonal dynamics and importance to tropical stream consumers are particularly understudied. In this year-round study of terrestrial invertebrate input to two Trinidadian headwater streams with different forest canopy densities, we sought to (a) measure the mass and compo...

We investigated pre-service elementary teachers’ engagement in science and English language arts (ELA) instruction integrated in the context of a children’s book. Teachers developed models and conducted a compare-and-contrast analysis after exposure to different accounts of the butterfly life cycle: a popular children’s book, The Very Hungry Caterp...

Socio-scientific issues (SSI) are informed by science concepts but require consideration of societal aspects in order to be effectively understood and resolved. As a result, functional scientific literacy necessitates fluency with science as well as other domains of knowledge when engaged in reasoning about science and societal dimensions of SSI (i...

The identification of high-leverage teaching practices that can be improved through targeted practice should contribute to the enhancement of teachers’ facilitation of instruction and improve student learning outcomes. Researchers have begun to identify subject-specific teaching practices that are expected to enhance science teaching specifically....

Although climate change garners the bulk of headlines, ocean acidification is an equally important issue that also results from our increasing consumption of fossil fuels. As atmospheric CO2 dissolves into the ocean, the ocean’s pH decreases, making it increasingly difficult for organisms that build calcium carbonate skeletons to grow and thrive. G...

Water-literate individuals effectively reason about the hydrologic concepts that underlie socio-hydrological issues (SHI), but functional water literacy also requires concomitant reasoning about the societal, non-hydrological aspects of SHI. Therefore, this study explored the potential for the socio-scientific reasoning construct (SSR), which inclu...

Although the positive effects of active learning (AL) on students’ learning and attitudes are well documented, there seems to be an equally large amount of evidence suggesting that students resist AL. In this chapter, we explore this AL paradox by describing a study that employed a novel AL approach aligned with reform documents and a consensus def...

Several studies have found active learning to enhance students’ motivation and attitudes. Yet, faculty indicate that students resist active learning and censure them on evaluations after incorporating active learning into their instruction, resulting in an apparent paradox. We argue that the disparity in findings across previous studies is the resu...

In addition to considering sociocultural, political, economic, and ethical factors (to name a few), effectively engaging socioscientific issues (SSI) requires that students understand and apply scientific explanations and the nature of science (NOS). Promoting such understandings can be achieved through immersing students in authentic real-world co...

In this design case, we describe our work to develop a gameful learning design for use in an introductory, under-graduate biology laboratory course for science majors. Our design team included three university-based mathematics and science educators and a biologist responsible for the management of curriculum and instruction in the course under stu...

Among the many responsibilities of K-12 educators is to promote the development of environmental literacy among their students. Contentious environmental issues are often considered socioscientific issues (SSI; e.g., climate change) in that they are rooted in science, but a myriad of non-scientific (e.g., cultural, political, economic, etc.) factor...

There is a long history of some students finding that the science instruction they receive in schools fails to address their deeply held concerns about the theory of evolution. Such concerns are principally religious, though there are also students with deeply held religious views who are perfectly comfortable with the theory of evolution. New inst...

While much is known about the characteristics that researchers deem valuable for professional development (PD), teachers’ perceptions of their PD needs are less understood. In this study, we sought to explore teachers’ perceptions of their PD needs, including PD format, time frame, and topics covered, and how those perceptions varied by teachers’ d...

As the partisan divide becomes more toxic to civil discourse, the role of science in that conversation also suffers from collateral damage, becoming suspect at best, and marginalized at worse, in terms of its contribution to resolving issues rooted in science having national and global significance. The authors suggest ameliorating that damage by u...

An introductory undergraduate biology laboratory session about vertebrate tissues was gamified to elucidate the effects of gameful learning on students 'perceptions of their own learning and motivation. Student groups were randomly assigned a vertebrate tissue, including corresponding slides and content from the laboratory manual, and tasked with d...

Terrestrial invertebrates subsidize fish diets in lotic ecosystems. Seasonality strongly influences terrestrial invertebrate abundance in temperate regions and alters their delivery to streams. Seasonal changes in the tropics are characterized by distinct wet and dry periods, with marked variation in invertebrate abundance. However, little is known...