The purpose of this study is to develop an instrument to assess civic scientific literacy in media (SLiM). A total of 50 multiple-choice items were developed based on the 95 most common scientific terms appearing in media covering the subjects of biology (45.26%, 22 items), earth science (37.90%, 19 items), physics (11.58%, 6 items) and chemistry (5.26%, 3 items) in Taiwan. A total of 1034 students from three distinct groups (7^th graders, 10^th graders and undergraduates) were invited to participate in this study. The reliability of this instrument was 0.86 (KR20). The average difficulty of the SLiM ranged from 0.19 to 0.91, and the discrimination power is 0.1 to 0.59. According to participants’ performances on SLiM, it was revealed that 10^th graders (Mean = 37.3±4.2) performed better than undergraduates (Mean = 33.0±5.5) and 7^th graders (Mean = 26.7±8.3) with significant differences (p< .05).

The ability of citizens to be able to understand and critically read and discuss the scientific reports presented in media is of inc creasing importance in science education. The SLiM (Scientific Literacy in Media) approach, on which this study is based, gives a possibility to measure scientific literacy based on the most commonly appearing scientific terms in news media. This study analyzed the 22 biology items from the prior SLiM study and identified the most difficult biology concepts for Taiwanese (N=619) and Swedish (N=117) non-science majors from university and upper secondary levels. The correct rate (%) of each item was analyzed to present students’ performances on each item. From the results, in general, it was found that Taiwanese students performed better than Swedish students at both university and upper secondary levels. However, Swedish university students were a bit better than the Taiwanese in definition-based (DB) items. Looking at the individual country, both Swedish and Taiwanese students’ performances on context-based (CB) items were better than DB items with significant difference (p<.01). Among the four items that were found difficult for both Swedish and Taiwanese students, two relates to biotechnology, and the other two are about function of enzymes and cell biology.

Images, diagrams and other forms of visualization are playing increasingly important roles in molecular life science teaching and research, both for conveying information and as conceptual tools, transforming the way we think about the events and processes the subject covers. This study examines how upper secondary and tertiary students interpret visualizations of transport through the cell membrane in the form of a still image and an animation. Twenty upper secondary and five tertiary students were interviewed. In addition, 31 university students participated in a group discussion and answered a questionnaire regarding the animation. A model, based on variation theory, was then tested as a tool for distinguishing between what is expected to be learned, what is present in the visualizations, and what is actually learned by the students.

Three critical features of the ability to visualize biomolecular processes were identified from the students’ interpretations of the animation: the complexity of biomolecular processes, the dynamic and random nature of biomolecular interactions, and extrapolation between 2D and 3D. The results of this study support the use of multiple representations to achieve different learning goals.

Molecular life science is one of the fastest-growing fields of scientific and technical innovation, and biotechnology has profound effects on many aspects of daily life, often with deep ethical dimensions. At the same time the content is inherently complex, highly abstract and deeply rooted in diverse disciplines ranging from “pure sciences,” such as maths, chemistry, and physics, through “applied sciences”, such as medicine and agriculture, to subjects that are traditionally within the remit of humanities, notably philosophy and ethics. Together these features pose diverse, important, and exciting challenges for tomorrow’s teachers and educational establishments.

With backgrounds in molecular life science research and secondary life science teaching, we (LT and CJR, respectively) bring different experiences, perspectives, concerns, and awareness of these issues. Taking the nature of the discipline as a starting point, we highlight important facets of molecular life science that are both characteristic of the domain and challenging for learning and education. Of these challenges we focus in most detail on content, reasoning difficulties, and communication issues. We also discuss implications for education research and teaching in the molecular life sciences.

When confronted with the representations and terms of science, students make meaning using the knowledge and language they possess. They make frequent use of conventional expressions, but they also use words that seemingly have no conventional meaning, here labelled help-words. This study explores the verbal resources upper secondary students use to make meaning of molecular life science. The paper gives a description of the phenomenon of non-conventionalised expressions, help-words, based on a study of 20 upper secondary students. The results indicate that help-words are meaningful in learning situations, especially in abstract disciplines such as molecular life science.

Motivated by a long-term goal in education for measuring Taiwanese civic scientific literacy in media (SLiM), this work reports the detailed techniques to efficiently mine a concept map from two years of Chinese news articles (901,446 in total) for SLiM instrument development. From the Chinese news stories, key terms (important words or phrases), known or new to existing lexicons, were first extracted by a simple, yet effective, rule-based algorithm. They were subjected to an association analysis based on their co-occurrence in sentences to reveal their term-to-term relationship. A given list of 3,657 index terms from science textbooks were then matched against the term association network. The resulting term network (including 95 scientific terms) was visualized in a concept map to scaffold the instrument developers. When developing an item, the linked term pair not only suggests the topic for the item due to the clear context being mutually reinforced by each other, but also the content itself because of the rich background provided by the recurrent snippets in which they co-occur. In this way, the resulting instrument (comprised of 50 items) reflect the scientific knowledge revealed in the daily news stories, meeting the goal for measuring civic scientific literacy in media. In addition, the concept map mined from the texts served as a convenient tool for item classification, developer collaboration, and expert review and discussion.

The trend of socioscientific issues (SSIs) has been emergent in the science- and technology-dominated society of today. Accordingly, during the past 20 years, students’ skills of argumentation and informal reasoning about SSIs have achieved greater emphasis and profile in school education. Based upon the importance of SSIs, more and more researchers have investigated how students reason and make arguments about SSIs, and also explored the dimensions influencing students’ arguments and also involved in the various SSIs. This article has a threefold purpose. Firstly, we want to address the different roles of SSIs in science education nowadays, and secondly, after reviewing the divergent dimensions involved in SSIs from previous literature, we want to provide a holistic view to represent the essence of SSIs via the SEE-SEP model (connecting six subject areas of Sociology/culture, Environment, Economy, Science, Ethics/morality and Policy with three aspects of value, personal experience and knowledge) developed here. Thirdly, to support the SEE-SEP model, examples extracted from former studies are presented. The implications for research and for school science education are discussed.