ABSTRACT: International Journal of Environmental and Science Education (IJESE) was founded in 2006 to disseminate high-quality open access research works related to psychological, sociological, economic, and organizational aspects of environmental science, environmental education, and science education, as well as evaluation studies of curriculum development in these fields. From its very first issue, IJESE has proven to be a distinguished scientific platform for experts throughout the World. Shortly after its launch, the journal was included in many respectable indexes such as ERIC and SCOPUS.

Due to a miscommunication between the founders of IJESE and the national ISSN center, the title of the journal was recorded as “International Journal of Environmental Science Education” (details are available at https:// portal.issn.org/resource/ISSN/1306-3065) instead of “International Journal of Environmental and Science Education”. Missing word: “and” in the title, generated a discrepancy between the aims of the journal and the title. Additionally, it caused many problems with index centers, such as loss of a considerable number of citations, etc.

In 2019, IJESE was acquired by Veritas Publications, UK, a London-based publisher of scientific journals. Veritas Publications, UK, decided to make the following changes to increase the impact and visibility of the journal:

1) During the transfer of the ISSN record for the journal, the title of the journal was changed to “Interdisciplinary Journal of Environmental and Science Education”. This change has cleared the inconsistency for the title. Additionally, the word: “Interdisciplinary” emphasized the interdisciplinary nature inherent in the journal’s aims and scope.
2) ijese.com is obtained in addition to ijese.net. Old issues of the journal remain accessible in ijese.net, while new issues of the journal continue to be published in ijese.com.
3) Article processing fee is waived for all articles.
4) All published articles are assigned unique DOI numbers.
5) All incoming manuscripts are subject to screening against plagiarism using a similarity check software.
6) More rigorous editorial criteria are enforced to accept a manuscript for publication.

Consequently, readers of IJESE enjoy top quality articles written by authors from diverse geographic locations.

We invite you to visit www.ijese.com for new issues and to submit your manuscripts to IJESE.

ABSTRACT: Understanding the complexity of ecological system is crucial if one is to achieve a proper understanding of what they are and how they function. This study followed an environmental education program designed to introduce fifth grade students from a highly rural community to the world of ornithology and to the importance of maintaining the biodiversity of birds in nature. Its goal was to explore the program’s influence on the development of these students’ system thinking skills in the context of the life-cycle of the Lesser Kestrel (LK). Students’ perceptions of system complexity were tracked using the repertory grid technique, which takes the form of a highly structured interview in which constructs represent participants’ interpretations of various elements and the relationships between them. The results indicate that these fifth graders developed a significantly complex view of the LK’s ecosystem. Participation in the program developed the ability of some of the students to generalize and to identify changes that occurred in the birds’ ecosystem over time. Design elements such as longitudinal real-time observations and learning about the kestrel’s life-cycle while examining its interaction with its environment were found to be important for system thinking development. These cognitive tools may enable students to better cope with complex, biodiversity-related environmental issues in the future.

ABSTRACT: The success of science education is in promoting conceptualisation, both disciplinary and interdisciplinary, in meeting desired learning goals. This research seeks to identify the quality of, upper secondary school students’ dimensions of knowledge and conceptualisation, related to a set of science-related disciplinary and interdisciplinary core ideas. Using validated guidelines, data collected from grade 10 (N=254) students, and an abductive thematic analysis approach are used to subsequently analyse student-created mind maps. Results show that most students are able to create mind maps, although these tend to be very general and indicate few interconnections between the different dimensions of knowledge presented. The results further suggest that, in general, it is difficult for students to conceptualise the interrelationships between science-related disciplinary and interdisciplinary core ideas and even show that some students hold misconceptions. The use of mind maps is seen as a meaningful approach to identifying learners’ ability to relate dimensions of knowledge applied to disciplinary and interdisciplinary core ideas in science education. The research identifies a need to investigate learning approaches in secondary school studies so as to promote more emphatically interconnections between disciplinary and interdisciplinary core ideas.

ABSTRACT: Graphics, graphs, diagrams, and visual representations of information play an integral role in science education and communication settings. The production of such graphics involves hundreds of design decisions, from content and layout to colour and illustration style, and any of these decisions has the potential to influence viewer’s experience and interpretation. While many studies have examined the influence of design on information transfer, comprehension, recall and so on, less attention has been given to affective impacts. In this study, we examined the impact of visual context in a biology life cycle diagram on viewers’ perception of relevance, sense of concern, and others. Results indicated that the presence of a contextual background in the diagram was associated with higher perception of relevance (related to personal experience). Context may also correlate with greater concern, though further research is needed to confirm this.

ABSTRACT: To test whether environmental immersion and mobile filmmaking (using smartphones or tablets) can engender positive attitudes to science, seventeen Year 10 (14-15 years old) drama students from Queen’s High School, New Zealand, were taken to Westland National Park to make videos about climate change using iPads (Immersion Group). Another fourteen students (Control Group) remained in Dunedin and also produced videos about climate change. Both groups had equal access to equipment, tutoring, incentives and footage. Yet, students in the Immersion Group were more likely to complete videos and produced videos of a higher quality. While there were no differences between the two groups in their attitudes to science before the experiment, afterwards the Immersion Group students had significantly more positive attitudes to doing science at school and beyond. The combination of environmental immersion and mobile filmmaking substantially increased interest in the environment and climate change, suggesting that it offers a promising tool for science education.

ABSTRACT: From 62 semi-structured interviews carried out with young people ages 14–25 who are engaged in the defense of the environment, we explored in this article how the circulation of scientific knowledge on the social media plays a role in engaging young people in defense of the environment to identify how internet can help to support them. As a result, despite respect for science and scientists, young people’s processing of scientific knowledge does not always seem to respect the standards of objectification advocated by the scientific approach. This can be problematic because they can appear to be contradictory for their detractors. Helping them to be more efficient in their active role for promoting environmental issues means to support them for a more scientific and reflexive use of social media. Thus, the many debates around environmental education can be enriched by an increasingly precise analysis of the expression of the commitment of young ecologists on the Internet.

ABSTRACT: Understanding human treatment towards nature provides insight into mitigating human induced environmental issues. This study determines whether individuals’ relationships with nature (NR), emotions experienced during evidence evaluation, and conservation concern drive evaluation of scientific arguments made about biodiversity conservation. Although we predicted that participants with strong NR would exhibit motivated reasoning, resulting in strong argument-evaluation skills as they evaluate an anti-conservation argument, we found that participants’ emotions during evidence evaluation were more predictive of their argument-evaluation skills. Further, participants with either low or high conservation concern demonstrated better argumentation skills. These findings suggest that while fostering strong relationships with nature may be important, of greater importance is to address emotions experienced when evaluating evidence. Furthermore, this study indicates a possibility that one’s reasoning about arguments made about biodiversity conservation may be motivated by how important one deems conservation to be.