Curricular integration in formal teaching of citizen science can bring to the classroom aspects of scientific literacy that encourage the involvement of citizens. In particular, these include non-epistemic aspects related to the sociology of science (which are often not transferred to the classroom). Furthermore, this practice raises awareness among students, and encourages them to become participants in the attainment of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This article describes a proposal for the integration of a citizen science project into the secondary education curriculum that can be reproduced in any educational center. Eighty-three secondary school pupils (14–15 years old) took part in this research at a city-center school in Northern Spain. A questionnaire based on validated studies was created and used to analyze the changes in attitudes of pupils towards science and technology and their improvement in scientific literacy in terms of scientific processes and scientific situations. The results indicate a significant improvement in the attitudes towards science and technology among the participating learners, as well as a better understanding of scientific processes and situations. Likewise, the results reflect how the implementation of the citizen science project contributes to the SDGs.

The teaching of STEAM has been gaining ground in the world of education for some years now. This article presents two fundamental contributions to STEAM literature. The first contribution is the detailed description of a STEAM work experience with secondary school students using Project Based Learning, in which the disciplines of science and art are connected and integrated. To achieve this, connections established among the disciplines corresponding to S, T, E, A and M are analysed. The second contribution presented in this paper is the study of the relationships established between the members of the educational community and the external educational agents (artists, researchers and research centres) involved in the project. These relationships among all the educational agents give rise to important connections relevant to STEAM education. Additionally, an increase in performance and interest in science and technology manifested by the students is analysed in a quantitative way. The students perceive an improvement in certain skills, such as teamwork, creativity, communication and self-evaluation. RESUMENLa enseñanza STEAM se está imponiendo en el mundo educativo desde hace unos años. Este artículo presenta dos contribuciones fundamentales a la literatura STEAM. En primer lugar, la descripción detallada de una experiencia de trabajo STEAM llevada a cabo con alumnado de Secundaria empleando Aprendizaje Basado en Proyectos, donde las disciplinas de ciencias y arte aparecen conectadas e integradas. Para esto, se analizan las conexiones que se establecen entre las disciplinas S, T, E, A y M. En segundo lugar, el estudio de las relaciones generadas entre los integrantes de la comunidad educativa y los agentes educativos externos (artistas, investigadores, centros de investigación) involucrados en el proyecto. Estas conexiones resultan una parte relevante de la educación STEAM. Además, se analiza de manera cuantitativa el aumento del rendimiento y del interés por la ARTICLE HISTORY

Recent studies pointing to evaluation methods in natural environments suggest that their use in the analysis of metacognitive skills provides more precise information than the use of off-line evaluation methods. In this research, mixed methods are used over one academic year for the evaluation of the metacognitive skills that students of Secondary Education apply to solve physics problems. The objectives of this study are to analyze the use of metacognitive skills in natural environments and to study behavioral patterns of student learning through a longitudinal study. A total of 509 recordings of think-aloud protocols are analyzed through the categorization of the responses (liquefying) and the protocol of Van der Stel and Veenman for the analysis of the quality of metacognitive skills. Fewer conceptual errors and less uncertainty over vocabulary were noted during the academic year. Nevertheless, a degree of ambiguity persisted in the understanding of physics concepts. The metacognitive skills of Orientation and Planning were used more than any others. The technique of graph analysis is also applied, to establish the patterns of behavior of each student throughout the academic year. Different patterns were found, the analysis of which helped to identify academically challenged and at-risk students. The use of mixed observation techniques and graph analysis facilitated information on the pace of learning of each student. Future studies will be directed at proposals for the automation of these evaluation techniques in natural learning environments.

Service-learning (SL) helps engineering students to be involved in community activities and to be motivated by their studies. Although several reviews and research studies have been published about SL, it is not widespread in sciences and engineering at the university level. The purpose of this research is to analyze the different community services or projects where SL is implemented by engineering students and faculty and to identify the procedures that were usually implemented to assess SL-based courses and activities. Assessment could be considered as the evaluation of a specific module and the engineering competencies, the evaluation of the effectiveness of the SL program, the assessment of the participation of the student in those programs, and the assessment of whether students have achieved certain outcomes or gained specific skills. We conducted a systematic review with a search in three scientific databases: Scopus, Science Direct, and ERIC educational database to analyze the assessment methods and what that assessment covers. From 14,107 publications related to SL, 120 documents were analyzed to inform the conclusions of this study. We found that SL is widely used in several universities as experiential education, and it is considered an academic activity. The most widely used assessment technique is a survey to evaluate the engagement and attitudes of students and, to a lesser extent, teamwork presentations.

La forma de enseñar y de aprender en la sociedad del siglo XXI ha cambiado. Actualmente, en un porcentaje alto la docencia se realiza en los Learning Management System. Estos sistemas permiten aplicar técnicas de Learning Analytics. La utilización de dichas herramientas, facilita, entre otros, conocer el patrón de aprendizaje de los estudiantes y la predicción de los alumnos en riesgo. El objetivo de este estudio fue conocer en orden jerárquico de importancia los patrones de aprendizaje más efectivos de los estudiantes en la plataforma. Se trabajó durante dos cursos académicos con una muestra de 122 estudiantes de Ciencias de la Salud. Los instrumentos utilizados fueron la plataforma Moodle v.3.1 y el análsis de los logs con técnicas de Machine Learning de regresión. Los resultados indican que el Modelo de Predicción Lineal Automático detectó en orden de importancia: las visitas medias por día, la realización por parte del estudiante de cuestionarios de autoevaluación, y la consulta al feedback del docente. El porcentaje de varianza explicada de estas variables sobre los resultados finales fue de un 50.8%. Asimismo, la efectividad del patrón conductual explicó 64.1% de la varianza de dichos resultados, hallándose tres clústeres de efectividad en el patrón conductual detectado.