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.

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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.

Previous studies have proposed that the grammars may serve as a rule-based scaffolding to facilitate story comprehension in storytelling activities. Such scaffoldings may inform students of crucial story elements and possible transitions among different elements. However, how these scaffoldings may influence story creation/writing activities is still not very clear. This study aims to understand and explore the relationship among rule-based scaffoldings, creative self-efficacy and storytelling products. By gathering the stories developed by 53 sixth graders and their creative self-efficacy in a quasi-experiment setting, this study investigated whether providing these rule-based scaffoldings may influence their performance and creative self-efficacy. The results of this study indicated that with these rule-based scaffoldings, students produced better storytelling products in terms of content quality. However, the presence of story grammar rules also limited the students' freedom of creative thinking, and thus reduced the creative self-efficacy level at the early stage of learning to create stories. Such findings support that the rule-based scaffolding may be more helpful in facilitating storytelling in the idea exploration phase than in the generation phase. Educators may need to be cautious regarding the time point at which rule-based scaffoldings would be most effectively integrated with learning activities.

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.

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’ 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.

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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.