The rapid advances in AI technologies showed a disruptive potential in educational practices, presenting new challenges and generating new opportunities. This phenomenon has been exacerbated since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, which has permanently transformed various educational activities and sparked widespread scientific interest. Research suggests that ChatGPT can help students navigate the complexities of STEM subjects. However, only a few studies have directed attention to the use of ChatGPT in STEM subjects in upper secondary education. With the purpose of addressing this gap, the aim of this study is to explore how students experience ChatGPT for their STEM studies, encompassing their usage, perceptions, and general knowledge about this technology. Using a mixed methods approach, the data collected included a survey and semi-structured interviews involving upper secondary students. The results show widespread adoption of ChatGPT across STEM subjects among participants, particularly in biology and especially as a tool to support the understanding of concepts. Although students exhibited limited knowledge of AI, they demonstrated some effective prompting strategies to generate relevant content and tackle potential inaccuracies and hallucinations. The findings in this paper provide insights to support the exploration of students’ experiences of ChatGPT, presenting relevant topics to further research the applications of these AI technologies within STEM subjects, given their importance for future societal development. © 2025 The Authors

High-quality teacher education plays a crucial role in the develop-ment of successful educational systems around the world. However,educational systems face challenges in relation to attracting andretaining excellent teachers. To meet teacher shortage, the Swedishgovernment introduced alternative programmes that are moreflexible than traditional teacher education. This paper aims to ana-lyse a one-year governmental teacher education initiative and pro-vide deeper insight into career changing student teachers´ as wellas newly graduated teachers´ transition into the teacher profession.Research questions asked were which students choose to becometeachers, why individuals from other professional backgroundschoose to change career and become a teacher, and what aspectsstudent teachers emphasise as crucial for developing their profes-sional identity as teachers of their particular subject content. Assuch, the results might give implications for the way student tea-chers are recruited to teacher education programmes and hownewly graduated teachers can develop professionally. © 2024 The Author(s). 

It is vital that upper secondary students gain a rich and deep knowledge of sustainability issues, as they will enter adulthood and working life within a short time. The students belong to a generation that will be intensely involved in managing several environmental issues to achieve sustainable development for our Earth. However, earlier research indicates that many teachers have a low self-efficacy for teaching sustainability issues. This study aimed to explore how science teacher teamsi n Swedish upper secondary schools can develop their knowledge and expertise in sustainable development (SD) through collective reflections with the support of the reflective tool Content Representation (CoRe). Science teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) development in teaching SD was examined. Twelve inservice science teachers participated in the study. The qualitative research design included semi-structured interviews and science teacher teams’ collective meetings.The findings covered four themes about how the collective reflections with support of the CoRe tool stimulated teachers’ PCK development: (1) creating structure and a focus for learning conversations, (2) modification of the teaching approach, (3) development of new content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge in SD, and (4) shared language to stimulate equal opportunities for students to learn SD. The conclusion is that with the support of CoRe, the teacher team’s collective PCK in SD was developed; therefore, we recommend that decision-makers within the school system organize regular meetings in science teacher teams and introduce CoRe to the teachers. © The Author(s) 2023.

Learning about sustainability issues is crucial for upper secondary students as they will enter adulthood within a short time. This study aimed to explore how science teacher teams in Swedish upper secondary schools can develop their knowledge and expertise for teaching about sustainable development (SD) through collective reflections with the support of the reflective tool Content Representation (CoRe). Twelve in-service science teachers participated in a study to investigate their development of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) for teaching SD. The qualitative research design included semi-structured interviews and audio-recordings from collective meetings with science teacher teams. The findings covered four themes about how the collective reflections with support of the CoRe tool stimulated teachers’ collective PCK development for teaching SD: (1) Creating structure and a focus for learning conversations, (2) Modification of the teaching approach, (3) Development of new content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge in SD, and (4) Shared language to stimulate equal opportunities for students to learn SD. As such, the results from the study provides important implications for how reflection among science teacher teams can be stimulated to promote teachers’ knowledge development for teaching about SD.

This study investigates preschool teachers’ considerations for including digital tools in science teaching to develop children’s learning of science content. Due to the ongoing digitalisation and demands in society, the utilisation of digital tools has increased significantly in educational settings. Recent research about digital tools in early childhood education focuses on various aspects of technology implementation. However, there is a research gap in which considerations underpin preschool teachers’ choices of what, why and how they integrate digital tools into science teaching. The data generation was conducted by different methods. The reflection tool Content Representations (CoRe) is used to make the preschool teachers’ considerations explicit when reflecting on planning science teaching regarding specific science content formulated as Big Ideas. Further, video stimulated recall interviews capture the preschool teachers’ considerations on their interactions with children in science activities and usingdigital tools. The Refined Consensus Model (RCM) of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) was employed as a theoretical framework for analysing and interpreting data around an entire teaching cycle. Some of the teachers’ considerations for including digital tools involve accessing children’s learning, making the abstract concrete and stimulating children’s engagement and learning. Further, the findings indicate that the considerations concerned knowledge about teachers’ personal PCK (pPCK) and enacted PCK (ePCK) aspects. © 2023, The Author(s).

The pursuit of sustainable development is a necessity for life on Earth and the future of humanity. Education is important in this endeavour; therefore, creating knowledge about teachers’ teaching for sustainable development is essential. This study aimed to investigate how Swedish upper secondary science teachers adjust their teaching of the environmental dimension in sustainable development to the different vocational education programmes their students attend. Data were collected through individual semi-structured interviews with 15 in-service science teachers and analysed by thematic coding. The result showed that most teachers (but not all) adjusted their teaching to the students’ vocational educational programme; however, they did it to different extents and in different ways. The result presents teachers’ descriptions of and arguments for adjusting their teaching linked to the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) framework. The PCK framework is used as a theoretical lens in this study. Further research is needed to investigate how science teachers’ adjustments to students’ vocational education affect the students’ knowledge of the environmental dimension in sustainable development and how that affects actions in their future professional life. © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Lärarutbildningen ska ge lärarstudenter möjlighet att utveckla ämnesdidaktisk kunskap om bland annat ämnesinnehållet, kursplaner och bedömning, vilket de sedan ska kunna omvandla till praktiska handlingar i klassrummet. För att lyckas behöver lärarstudenter även utveckla sin förmåga att reflektera didaktiskt och kunna använda sin reflektion för att utveckla sin undervisning. Inom lärarutbildningen vid Högskolan i Halmstad har vi använt de tre didaktiska reflektionsverktygen Content representation (CoRe), Storyline, och Lesson Observation Tool (LOT) för att utveckla lärarstudenternas förmåga att planera, genomföra och reflektera kring undervisning i naturvetenskap med koppling till sin VFU. I denna artikel vill vi dela med oss av våra erfarenheter av denna arbetsmodell. Syftet är att ge en beskrivning av hur lärarstudenter och verksamma lärare kan ta stöd av de tre vetenskapligt baserade reflektionsverktygen för att planera, genomföra och utvärdera undervisning i naturvetenskap.

Education has responded to global Sustainable Development (SD) goals by drawing on a range of issuerelated, context-based, and cross-curricular approaches to teaching SD. This paper aims to examine how teachers describe the content in SD and how they justify this content concerning their teaching practice. The Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) framework, with its reflective tool Content Representation (CoRe), was used in combination with semi-structured interviews to capture 18 Swedish upper-secondary science teachers' reflections. The results indicate four themes of content that the teachers emphasise: energy and global warming, ecosystem services and biodiversity, presence of harmful substances and materials in nature, and imbalance of natural substances in nature. The teachers justified these content themes in terms of the importance of students' gaining different perspectives (local, global, ecological, social, and economic), belief in the future, action competence, and general scientific education. The paper contributes to sustainability education research, as it focuses on teaching sustainability in the light of the PCK framework. Also, it can support and inspire teachers when they decide what content to include when teaching SD. © 2024 University of Oslo, Norwegian Centre for Science Education. All rights reserved.

This study investigated students’ meaning-making of polymeric concepts during modelling and discuss students’ creation of visible representations in chemistry. The analysis combines a phenomenographic and social semiotic approach and leads to the finding and description of 21 different meaning-making processes. We refer to meaning-making as the outcome of translative communication through representations, discerned by students, where the collective meaning of created representations that build on each other constitutes the meaning as a whole. The study took place in three Swedish upper secondary chemistry classes. Data were collected from eight groups of 3–4 students (n = 30). Video, audio recordings and photos taken during modelling were analysed to investigate students’ meaning-making during the modelling process. The results show translative changes between and within semiotic resources, indicating meaning for students’ learning of polymeric concepts. Additionally, the representations produced during modelling were essential resources connecting the submicro and macro levels by creating a ‘bridge’ between levels. The results show that the modelling activities practised by all groups were multimodal. The study acknowledges that teachers can use the social semiotic lens as a tool to evaluate students’ modelling in addition to the importance of translative processes during modelling. © 2023 The Royal Society of Chemistry.

Science education researchers have, over time, developed a refined understanding of the structure of science teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). This qualitative case study demonstrates that a combination of tools for reflection can support science teachers in capturing and developing PCK. Further, the study provides example of how the Refined Consensus Model (RCM) can be used as an analytical framework for capturing and developing science teachers' PCK.