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Higher education is facing low enrollment, and fewer students are motivated to select STEM majors. This paper reports the results from one university that recently experimentally reformed its undergraduate curriculum to a “theme-based curricula”, the New Engineering Curriculum Program (NECP). The subjects in this study were 127 engineering students who applied for the NECP at a university in northern Taiwan. An experimental design using the pre- and post-test measurements of the experimental and control groups was applied in this study. The results revealed a significant effect among those who participated as second- and third-year undergraduates in terms of their subject-specific performances and attitudes of learning in various courses. Furthermore, the results showed that students in the NECP showed better learning performance and higher learning motivation than students in the traditional course module. The outcomes and analyses are discussed.

By investigating scholarly output in science communication from 1997 to 2018, this research sought evidence that science education has been increasingly focusing on communication methods to reach the public. Through an automatic scientometric method, this study analyzed 1300 articles published in two leading journals in the field of science communication. As a result, seven trends were revealed and categorized into three themes: Public engagement with science (PES); Media and science (MS); and Issues in science (IS). Furthermore, PES and MS scholarly output were found increased significantly. The findings confirmed the goal of this research. However, it then suggested a research area of bridging science education and science communication that is currently less explored. Given increased focus towards PES and MS, these fields are primed for further collaboration to more engage the public in science learning. Keywords: CATAR, scientometric analysis, science communication, science education, science-edu-communication.

Learning about artificial intelligence (AI) has become one of the most discussed topics in the field of education. However, it has become an equally important learning approach in contemporary education to propose a “general education” agenda that conveys instructional messages about AI basics and ethics, especially for those students without an engineering background. The current study proposes a situated learning design for education on this topic. Through a three-week lesson session and accompanying learning activities, the participants undertook hands-on tasks relating to AI. They were also afforded the opportunity to learn about the current attributes of AI and how these may apply to understanding AI-related ethical issues or problems in daily life. A pre- and post-test design was used to compare the learning effects with respect to different aspects of AI (e.g., AI understanding, cross-domain teamwork, AI attitudes, and AI ethics) among the participants. The study found a positive correlation among all the factors, as well as a strong link between AI understanding and attitudes on the one hand and AI ethics on the other. The implications of these findings are discussed, and suggestions are made for possible future revisions to current instructional design and for future research.

In light of the increased time spent by people on watching the news via social media, what might be the communication impacts if science education could help in producing science news media for the public? The present study compared the audience levels of awareness, enjoyment, interest, opinion formation, and understanding (AEIOU) toward science experimentally between two groups: the general science communication (GSC) group (i.e., participants with general daily science news digestion) and the science edu-communication (SEC) group (i.e., participants who watched science news videos produced jointly by science educators, scientists, and news media production teams). As a result, those in the SEC group showed significantly higher levels of &ldquo, interest&rdquo, formed more scientific &ldquo, opinions&rdquo, and had better &ldquo, understanding&rdquo, than the GSC participants. In terms of creating an &ldquo, additional opportunity&rdquo, to develop science news media sustainably for the public, the present study confirms more salient outcomes when science educators are involved in the production of science news media.

Citizen seismology encourages the public involvement in data collection, analysis, and reporting, and has the potential to greatly improve the emergency response to seismic hazard. We believe in the value of citizen seismology and started with distributing Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) sensors at schools in Taiwan. Unlike most of western countries, Earth Sciences is a required course in junior and senior high schools of Taiwan (Ministry of Education, 2014). Low-cost seismometer is potentially a powerful tool in classrooms to teach earthquake science, which makes school teachers our targeted users. We work closely with school teachers and students to understand how can a citizen seismology project can help them to encourage successful engagement. In this study, we establish the achievements gained and problems encountered in different phases of the project since 2013. The main tasks carried out here include (1) refinement of Citizen Seismology Literacy (CSL) into three dimensions: Awareness, and Willingness, and Technology fluency (2) development of an interactive competition platform called the Near-Real Time Earthquake Game Competition (EGCnrt) that allows citizen seismologists to report earthquake information by processing P- and S-wave arrivals, peak ground motion, and first motion of P-waves for every inland M≥4 earthquakes in Taiwan; (3) development of the formative assessment for the 1.5-hour-long, non-lecture-based game activities. Based on 565 student surveys completed after our 2016 summer outreach activity, we found that all three CSL dimensions have an influence on students’ score in the training activity. The final score in EGCnrt is also found to highly correlate with the performance in the three training sections. We therefore, propose that the CSL can act as a powerful indicator for the performance and engagement in earthquake learning activities. The game-based, non-lecture-based learning approach can be effective in promoting citizen seismology in the future.

The aim of this exploratory study was to examine the impact of five personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and intellect/imagination) on the perception of students towards online learning. A total of 208 students from Taiwan (male = 96 and female = 112) with previous online course experience participated in an online survey using a bulletin board system. To measure personality traits and students’ perceptions, the Mini-International Personality Item Pool and the Perception of Students towards Online Learning instruments were used respectively. The researchers employed hierarchical regression analysis to analyse the data obtained. The results showed that two personality traits (conscientiousness and intellect/imagination) had a larger positive impact on students' perceptions towards online learning, whereas neuroticism had significantly negative effects on participants of online courses. These results provide evidence that students with different personality traits have different preferences for and experiences in online courses.

For better understanding of how the public perceive the information in science communication, this study sought to develop the scale of Science Edu-Communication (SEC), an instrument to measure AEIOU: Awareness, Enjoyment, Interest, Opinion formation, and Understanding. The AEIOU framework was adopted for use as the major component of SEC to depict participants&rsquo, general perceptions of science communication from their daily life experiences. Responses from 121 participants were analysed using exploratory factor analysis, item discrimination, and qualitative coding analysis. Results support SEC-AEIOU as a valid and reliable instrument to measure the effectiveness of science communication experiences. Additionally, SEC-AEIOU can serve as a framework for research and practice to bridge science communication and science education. In particular, science communicators, educators, and institutions that engage in science communication and educational activities may benefit from such a metric. This scale seeks to assist in building a robust framework to facilitate the trend of bridging science communication and science education: Science Edu-Communication.

In Taiwan, the production of science news would benefit by cooperation between communication (e.g., the news production team) and science education (e.g., instructional designers and scientists involved). The news production team is skilled in exposing stories vividly to motivate audiences, whereas the science education team carefully curates the scientific and instructional content. Therefore, we started the Different Science News project, which strives to align the above features of science news production. Through using concurrent, local, and concise materials that occur in daily lives, we hope to promote the public understanding of science.

This study explored higher education level syllabi to identify trends in educational objectives. Bloom’s Taxonomy and various strategic models were used to classify 714 objectives from 114 sections of courses administered through a Midwest teacher education institution in the United States. 1229 verbs and verb phrases were classified through the Taxonomy and differentiated between higher and lower ordered verbs as well as measureable and non-measureable learning outcomes. The results indicated that though learning outcomes the objectives are suggestive of higher ordered skills although the syllabi do not adequately provide information on the expected outcomes of the course.

In light of the increased usage of instructional media for teaching and learning, the design of these media as aids to convey the content for learning can be crucial for effective learning outcomes. In this vein, the literature has given attention to how concurrent on-screen text can be designed using these media to enhance learning performance. The present study sought to examine whether utilizing concurrent on-screen summarized text (CST) could improve students’ learning performance while estimating their perception of performance when learning with educational multimedia content. Although the findings did not show a significant improvement in students’ performance on the retention test among the CST groups, students exhibited a considerable higher level of confidence toward their performance. The findings suggest that students who learned with CST educational media may have overestimated their performance. Further analysis and discussion are included.

With the current advancement in information and communication technology, incorporating the already pervasive handheld devices for learning and teaching has become a common theme. The application of handheld learning devices in a one-to-one learning environment may further inform a specific need for structuring a seamless learning framework, establishing a holistic didactic paradigm, and directing future development. Within this framework, each one-on-one learning scenario would allow students to initiate and engage in learning activities individually, specifically accommodating their personal needs, preferences, and learning styles – an individual learning context. Furthermore, peers (including the instructors) may learn and teach bidirectionally via handheld learning devices in various juxtapositions and relationships provided by the shared learning platform – a collaborative learning context. Furthermore, a sense of social presence and engagement with the learning community may be engendered by transforming students’ intragroup participation to intergroup interaction, thus encouraging student readiness to share more experiences in the learning community – a community-based learning context. The current chapter discusses the rationale for and the potential to structure this framework to build a seamless environment for teaching and learning with handhelds.