This international investigation was designed to determine if, and under what circumstances experiences at science centers, significantly correlated with a range of adult general public science and technology literacy measures. Given the complex and cumulative nature of science and technology learning, and the highly variable and free‐choice nature of science center experiences, an epidemiological research approach was used. Quantitative surveys were administered to 6,089 adults living in 17 communities located in 13 countries; all with active science centers. Data collection and analysis protocols ensured a representative sampling based on age, education, and income from each of the 17 participating communities. Results showed that individuals who used science centers had significantly higher understanding, interest and curiosity, participation in free‐choice leisure activities, and identity relative to science and technology than did individuals who did not visit; even when potential self‐selection biases such as income, education level, and prior interest were taken into consideration. These findings significantly strengthen the argument that the presence of one or more healthy and active science centers within a community, region, or country represents a vital investment for fostering and maintaining a scientifically and technologically informed, engaged, and literate public.

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In this paper, we utilize a discursive psychological approach to further explore agency and structure in science education research. The aim of our research is to understand how we can provide opportunities for marginalized students in preservice elementary teacher education in an Australian university to become agentic concerning environmental sustainability. Preservice teacher agency in this study is understood as the positioning of preservice teachers as responsible for their action. Responsibility can be indexed using grammatical devices including pronouns. Structure and agency are analyzed as constantly remade through socially meaningful action and the smallest course of our analysis is the social act. In this way, we have treated agency and structure as a dialectic but avoided their central conflation. Our findings emerged from the analysis of open ended reflective journals written by the preservice teachers related to taking action in their daily lives to reduce their ecological footprint during a semester-long science course. We select an instrumental case, Ecocarmie, to illustrate our findings and the potential of our discursive psychological approach for further research in this area. In our analysis, we show how Ecocarmie selfpositions in the public domain of Tumblr as pro-environmentally engaged, drawing upon social and material resources and discuss the implications of our study for preservice teacher education in EfS. # 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 52:560-573, 2015

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