To prepare students to meet the challenges of the 21st century, science educators must equip students with science literacy skills and the means to apply those skills to benefit their communities. In our research, we investigate how students’ develop science civic engagement over the course of a semester-long science literacy course. We explore how students think that science can be used to help their communities, and we seek to understand how other factors, like community cohesion, science identity, and personal salience of specific issues, impacts the development of science civic engagement. In this talk, I’ll discuss both students general understanding of civic engagement and also the ways that we have found context might affect the transfer of skills from the classroom to the community.

Presented by Dr. Jen Teshera-Levye