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Worldwide, an influx of immigration, has increased the heterogeneity of our classrooms. In light of today’s heightened teacher accountability, standards and high-stakes assessment, traditional ways of teaching need to change in order to effectively serve the needs of our culturally and linguistically diverse students. Therefore, a qualitative-interpretive study was conducted with ten science teachers working in six private, international schools based in Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and Belgium with a focus on teacher perceptions, beliefs, teaching practices, and instructional resources used to teach science to English Language Learners (ELLs). Emphasis was placed on the specific teaching modalities and resources that science teachers use to support ELLs in their classrooms. It also addressed the needs of teachers to effectively teach science to ELLs. In response to the research questions, the thematic analysis revealed that the teachers working in these schools had a good awareness of ELL needs in science and wanted to make a difference for these learners. They perceived ELLs as quiet, but hardworking and motivated students. To some degree, the teachers used all seven modalities of teaching: reading, writing, speaking, listening, doing, interpreting, and representing, with or without the use of technology, and considered multimodality to be the most effective way to make science accessible to ELLs. Though not exhaustive, this research offers a set of pedagogical tools and resources for pre-service and in-service teachers to meet the needs of their ELLs in science. Furthermore, based on the teacher responses, the research identifies five key areas which are necessary for science literacy development of culturally and linguistically diverse students. These include: (i) teachers’ positive mindset and awareness towards ELLs in science; (ii) school leadership and administrative support for ELLs; (iii) time, multimodality, and specialized professional development (PD) to scaffold science for ELLs; (iv) the provision of realistic opportunities to collaborate with the ELL or English Language Development (ELD) teacher; and (v) co-teaching science with an ELL/ELD teacher. I would hereby like to share the findings of this thesis and make these accessible to fellow science teachers in the hope that they will refer and/or utilize the proposed strategies and resources in their daily practice.

Although careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics have expanded in the United States, science literacy skills for K-12 students have declined from 2001 to 2011. Limited research has been conducted on the impact of science enrichment programs on the science literacy skills of K-12 students, particularly in marine science. The purpose of this study was to describe the impact of a marine science summer enrichment camp located in the eastern region of the United States on the ocean literacy skills of middle school students who participated in this camp. Weimar's learner centered teaching approach and the definition and principles of ocean literacy formed the conceptual framework. The central research question focused on how a marine science summer enrichment camp impacted the ocean literacy skills of middle grade students. A single case study research design was used with ten participants including 3 camp teachers, four students, and 3 parents of Grade 6-8 students who participated this camp in 2016. Data were collected from multiple sources including individual interviews of camp teachers, students, and parents, as well as camp documents and archival records. A constant comparative method was used to construct categories, determine emergent themes and discrepant data. Results indicated that the marine science camp positively impacted the ocean literacy skills of middle school students through an emphasis on a learner centered instructional approach. The findings of this study may provide a positive social impact by demonstrating active science literacy instructional strategies for teachers which can motivate students to continue studies in science and science related fields.

The following thesis will set out to argue that misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracies, in tandem with today’s advanced communication technology, pose a dire threat to the future of public health, biotechnological advancement, safe medical procedures, and ethical evidence-based legislation and policy. Each chapter will explore different points in public health and medicine that misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracies have already begun to shift or disrupt in ways that are eroding safe and effective care. Misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories should be seen more broadly outside of the spheres of Big Tech and First Amendment discourse, and instead understood as a public health concern of which there are ways to inoculate, treat, and mitigate public spread. Much as we have come to understand that gun violence requires more than a judicial approach, so too must we come to understand misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories as an indicator of failing health in a population. / Urban Bioethics

The COVID-19 Pandemic has exemplified the weaknesses in science education. Americans struggle to understand the scientific process and why its findings change. This has caused skepticism to brew. Since museums serve their respective communities as translators of complex information, then they also must support the enhancement of science literacy. To enhance science literacy, digital content must first explain how science is relevant and then explain how the scientific process works. History institutions have the perfect opportunity to walk their audiences through a step-by-step process to understand the changing face of science better. This study accounts for a website I developed to 1.) put in practice some of the essential science literary lessons intuitions might use, and 2.) connect audiences with resources of the 1918 Flu Pandemic. The 1918 Flu Pandemic serves as a model for how history can help explain complex scientific ideas and their relevance to the present due to seasonal outbreaks of influenza and the COVID-19 Pandemic. / History

The goal of the most recent science education reform movement in the U.S. is science literacy for all Americans. Science literacy among U.S. students remains low, however, as compared with students in other industrialized countries, and is lowest among English Language Learner (ELL) students. Although there are barriers to developing science literacy for all adolescent students, ELL students often experience additional barriers that make developing science literacy even more challenging without support. Because textbooks are often heavily relied upon by secondary science teachers, the opportunity for many ELLs to develop science literacy may depend upon the support for these students included in science textbooks. Many textbook publishers have included textual tools for teaching ELLs in the teacher's editions of science textbooks they claim will help teachers support the learning of ELLs in the ways that are recommended by national standards, which describe appropriate science content, pedagogy, and language supports. These standards, referred to in this study as ELL standards, include the Benchmarks for Science Literacy, the CREDE standards, the WIDA standards, and the TIMSS standards. The purpose of this descriptive qualitative content analysis was to determine how the textual tools for teaching ELLs found in three widely used secondary biology textbooks in the U.S. are aligned with the ELL standards. All textual tools were read, reread, and coded using the ELL standards as a priori coding categories. The results indicate that some of the textual tools in the biology textbooks align with the ELL standards. However, the frequency of alignment between the textual tools and the ELL standards is not high. Further, many of the instances of alignment between the textual tools and the ELL standards are implicit, rather than explicit, indicating that the alignment between them is weak. Finally, many of the textual tools that are aligned with the ELL standards are only aligned with one of the categories within a given standard and ignore other, important, categories. It is recommended that textbook publishers update the textual tools for teaching ELLs in future editions of their textbooks to make them more aligned with the ELL standards. It is further recommended that secondary science teachers be better prepared so they will not have to rely on the textual tools for teaching ELLs in their instruction.

Scientific literacy has been at the forefront of science education reform for the past 20 years, particularly for students from culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) backgrounds (Lee et. al., 2005; Pearson, Moje & Greenleaf, 2010). The ability to extract meaning from text is an important skill. Yet many students struggle with effectively comprehending what they read, particularly in content areas of science, math and history. According to the National Assessment Educational Progress (NAEP, 2013) report, adolescents are not acquiring advanced literacy skills needed to succeed in the workplace and academic setting. Literacy experts have called for the use of disciplinary literacy approaches to engage learners with the content in ways that mirror what scientists, historians and mathematicians do to gain understanding in their disciplines (Moje, 2006; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). Although disciplinary literacy instruction is promising, there is limited empirical research on the effectiveness of discipline-specific literacy approaches. The present study examined the effects of a metalinguistic approach on the comprehension of science text among African American 5 and 6th grade students. The focus of the instructional protocol was to explicitly teach adverbial clauses and assist students to unpack adverbial clauses through the use of a graphic organizer. The process of unpacking complex sentences aimed to facilitate comprehension of science text by engaging the participants in analysis and discussion of the meaning obtained from the adverbial clauses. This study employed an experimental single-case multiple-probe across participants design. Visual Analysis (VA) and the Improvement Rate Difference (IRD) were used to analyze the data. The results of VA and IRD indicated that all participants demonstrated progress between baseline and treatment phases. Overall, the results of the investigation suggest that it is possible for 5th and 6th grade African American students to benefit from instruction that closely analyzes language. Clinical implications and future research directions are discussed.