research paper about 21st century

• Open access
• Published: 25 November 2019

Developing student 21 st Century skills in selected exemplary inclusive STEM high schools

• Stephanie M. Stehle   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4017-186X 1 &
• Erin E. Peters-Burton 1  

International Journal of STEM Education volume  6 , Article number:  39 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

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Metrics details

There is a need to arm students with noncognitive, or 21 st Century, skills to prepare them for a more STEM-based job market. As STEM schools are created in a response to this call to action, research is needed to better understand how exemplary STEM schools successfully accomplish this goal. This conversion mixed method study analyzed student work samples and teacher lesson plans from seven exemplary inclusive STEM high schools to better understand at what level teachers at these schools are engaging and developing student 21 st Century skills.

We found of the 67 lesson plans collected at the inclusive STEM high schools, 50 included instruction on 21 st Century skills. Most of these lesson plans designed instruction for 21 st Century skills at an introductory level. Few lesson plans encouraged multiple 21 st Century skills and addressed higher levels of those skills. Although there was not a significant difference between levels of 21 st Century skills by grade level, there was an overall trend of higher levels of 21 st Century skills demonstrated in lesson plans designed for grades 11 and 12. We also found that lesson plans that lasted three or more days had higher levels of 21 st Century skills.

Conclusions

These findings suggest that inclusive STEM high schools provide environments that support the development of 21 st Century skills. Yet, more can be done in the area of teacher professional development to improve instruction of high levels of 21 st Century skills.

Introduction

School-aged students in the USA are underperforming, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects. National Assessment of Educational Progress (U.S. Department of Education, 2015a ) scores show that in science, only 34% of 8th graders are performing at or above proficiency and 12th grade students at or above proficient US students drop to 22%. Similarly, mathematics scores show 33% of 8th graders and 22% of 12th graders were at or above proficiency (U.S. Department of Education, 2015a ). Additionally, the US mathematics scores for the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for 2015 were lower than the scores for 2009 and 2012 (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development; OECD, 2018 ). US students not only underachieve in mathematics and science, but are also not engaging successfully in engineering and technology. At the secondary level, there are relatively few students in the USA that take engineering (2%) and computer science (5.7%) (National Science Board, 2016 ). The NAEP technology and engineering literacy (TEL) assessment found that for technology and engineering literacy, only 43% of 8th graders were at or above the proficiency level (U.S. Department of Education, 2015b ). This consistent trend of underperformance has focused many national, state, and local efforts to improve student experiences in integrated STEM subjects (cf. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, 2010 ; Texas Education Association ( n.d. ) for school-aged students and beyond.

The efforts for improvement in STEM teaching in K-12 environments have yielded a slight increase in the enrollment of STEM majors recently (National Science Board, 2016 ). However, roughly half of students who declare a STEM major when entering college either switch majors or drop out of college (National Science Board, 2016 ). One approach to helping students persist in undergraduate education is a stronger foundation in content knowledge, academic skills, and noncognitive skills (Farrington et al., 2012 ). Academic skills, including analysis and problem solving skills, allow students to engage with content knowledge at higher levels of cognition. Noncognitive skills, including study skills, time management, and self-management, assist students in optimizing their ability to gain content knowledge and use their academic skills to solve problems. Students who possess these skills have high-quality academic behaviors, characterized by a pursuit of academic goals despite any setbacks (Farrington et al., 2012 ).

Because academic skills, noncognitive skills, and content knowledge have fluid definitions and may not be directly observable, for the purposes of this study we used 21 st Century skills consisting of knowledge construction, real-world problem solving, skilled communication, collaboration, use of information and communication technology for learning, and self-regulation (Partnership for 21 st Century Learning, 2016 ). Graduates who possess 21 st Century skills are sought out by employers (National Research Council, 2013 ). In the environment of rapid advancements in technology and globalization, employees need to be flexible and perpetual learners in order to keep up with new developments (Bybee, 2013 ; Johnson, Peters-Burton, & Moore, 2016 ). There is a need to ensure that students who graduate the K-12 system are adept in 21 st Century skills so that they can be successful in this new workforce landscape (Bybee, 2013 ).

Not only do 21 st Century skills help students be successful in all areas of formal school, these skills are also necessary for a person to adapt and thrive in an ever changing world (Partnership for 21 st Century Learning, 2016 ). One movement embracing the need for the development of student 21 st Century skills is the proliferation of inclusive STEM high schools (ISHSs), schools that serve all students regardless of prior academic achievement (LaForce et al., 2016 ; Lynch et al., 2018 ). ISHSs promote student research experiences by using inquiry-based curricular models to scaffold independent learning and encourage personal responsibility (Tofel-Grehl & Callahan, 2014 ). The goal for ISHSs to facilitate this type of student-centered learning is to build students’ 21 st Century skills such as adaptability, communication, problem solving, critical thinking, collaboration, and self-management (Bybee, 2013 ; Johnson et al., 2016 ; LaForce et al., 2016 ). Although there has been some evidence that not all ISHSs are advantageous in offering STEM opportunities (Eisenhart et al., 2015 ), there is an accumulation of evidence that ISHSs can increase college and career readiness for students from groups who are typically underrepresented in STEM careers (Erdogan & Stuessy, 2015 ; Means, Wang, Viki, Peters, & Lynch, 2016 ). As the number of inclusive STEM schools continue to increase across the USA, there is a need to understand the ways these schools successfully engage students in 21 st Century skills. The purpose of this paper is to systematically analyze teacher-constructed lessons and student work from seven exemplar ISHSs in order to better understand how teachers are engaging and developing student 21 st Century skills.

Specifically, this study looked at the extent to which teachers at these exemplar ISHSs ask students to practice the 21 st Century skills and at the level of student performance of the following categories: (a) knowledge construction, (b) real-world problem solving, (c) skilled communication, (d) collaboration, (e) use of information and communication technology (ICT) for learning, and (f) self-regulation (SRI International, n.d. -a; SRI International, n.d. -b). An examination of the lesson plans and student work products at exemplar ISHSs provides insight into effective development of student 21 st Century skills in a variety of contexts.

Conceptual framework

In an attempt to clearly define the skills, content knowledge and literacies that students would need to be successful in their future endeavors, the Partnership for 21 st Century Learning (P21; 2016) created a framework that includes (a) life and career skills; (b) learning and innovation skills; (c) information, media, and technology skills; and (d) key subjects (Partnership for 21 st Century Learning, 2016 ). The first three parts of the framework, (a) life and career skills, (b) learning and innovation skills, and (c) information, media, and technology skills, describe proficiencies or literacies students should develop and can be integrated and developed in any academic lesson. The fourth piece, key subjects, suggests 21 st Century interdisciplinary themes or content to engage students in authentic study (Partnership for 21 st Century Learning, 2016 ).

Due to the need to build 21 st Century skills, this study focused on the teaching and learning of (a) learning and innovation skills; (b) information, media, and technology skills; and (c) life and career skills at exemplar ISHSs. In order to operationalize and measure the three categories, we searched for instruments that measured the learning of 21 st Century skills. Microsoft, in collaboration with SRI Education, developed two rubrics that are designed to assess the extent to which 21 st Century skills are present in lessons and the extent to which students demonstrate the skills from these lessons (SRI International, n.d. -a; SRI International, n.d. -b). The 21 st Century Learning Design Learning Activity Rubric examined the proficiency of teacher lesson plans for the development of 21 st Century skills while the 21 st Century Learning Design Student Work Rubric examined the level of competency for each 21 st Century skill. Although the rubrics did not align exactly with the P21 Framework, we felt that there was enough alignment with the categories that the rubrics would be useful in measuring the extent to which lessons in ISHSs taught 21 st Century skills and the extent to which students demonstrated these skills. The rubrics had the same categories for lesson assessment and student work assessment: (a) knowledge construction, (b) real-world problem solving, (c) skilled communication, (d) collaboration, (e) use of ICT for learning, and (f) self-regulation in teacher lesson plans and student work samples (SRI International, n.d. -a; SRI International, n.d. -b). Table 1 shows how the categories assessed in the two rubrics align with the categories in the P21 Framework. Further, as we reviewed the literature on these categories, a model of their relationship emerged. Our literature review discusses the individual categories followed by the conceptual model of how these categories work together in 21 st Century skill development.

• Knowledge construction

Knowledge construction occurs when students create new knowledge themselves rather than reproducing or consuming information (Prettyman, Ward, Jauk, & Awad, 2012 ; Shear, Novais, Means, Gallagher, & Langworthy, 2010 ). When students participate in knowledge construction rather than reproduction, they build a deeper understanding of the content. Learning environments that are designed for knowledge construction promote self-regulated and self-directed learners as well as building grit (Carpenter & Pease, 2013 ).

Although knowledge construction helps students to build deep understandings and skills to be self-directed and resilient learners, many students are unfamiliar with this approach to learning and frequently need scaffolding to take on joint responsibility of learning (Carpenter & Pease, 2013 ; Peters, 2010 ). When transitioning to a more student-centered learning environment that supports knowledge construction, the teacher becomes more of a facilitator rather than a lecturer (McCabe & O’Connor, 2014 ). A student-centered learning environment encourages students to shift from a paradigm of expecting one convergent answer and toward deeper meaning-making when learning (Peters, 2010 ). Knowledge construction anchors the development of 21 st Century skills because students need to be able to have background knowledge in order to perform the skills in an authentic context.

• Real-world problem solving

Sometimes called project-based learning (Warin, Talbi, Kolski, & Hoogstoel, 2016 ), real-world problem solving is characterized by students working to solve problems that have no current solution and where the students can implement their own approach (Shear et al., 2010 ). When solving a real-world problem, students work to identify the problem, propose a solution for a specific client, test the solution, and share their ideas (Prettyman et al., 2012 ; Warin et al., 2016 ). The design aspect of the process encourages students to be creative and learn from failures (Carroll, 2015 ). When using real-world problem solving, students develop knowledge in a meaningful way (White & Frederiksen, 1998 ), must regulate their cognition and behavior in a way to reach their goals (Brown, Bransford, Ferrara, & Campione, 1983 ; Flavell, 1987 ), and gain experience defending their choices through evidence and effective communication skills (Voss & Post, 1988 ).

Teachers can develop real-world problem solving skills in their students by modeling inquiry after research actual scientist are involved in, using databases with real-life data, and evaluating evidence from current events (Chinn & Malhortra, 2002 ). Designing real-world problem scenarios for the classroom provide a framework by which students can engage in 21 st Century learning and can help to encourage a more positive attitude towards STEM careers (Williams & Mangan, 2016 ). Together, knowledge construction and real-world problem solving create the foundation from which students can engage in self-regulation, collaboration, and communication.

• Self-regulation

Self-regulation is a key 21 st Century skill for independent learners. Students who are self-regulated plan their approach to problem solving, monitor their progress, and reflect on their work given feedback (Shear et al., 2010 ; Zimmerman, 2000 ). During the self-regulation process, a student motivates himself or herself to control impulses in order to efficiently solve problems (Carpenter & Pease, 2013 ; English & Kitsantas, 2013 ). Fortunately, these skills are teachable; however, students need time to accomplish regulatory tasks and guidance for the key processes of reflection and revision (Zimmerman, 2000 ). Therefore, long-term projects give a more appropriate time frame than short-term projects to hone these regulatory skills.

Students have different levels of self-regulation (English & Kitsantas, 2013 ) and teachers may need to integrate strategies and ways of monitoring students into lessons (Bell & Pape, 2014 ; English & Kitsantas, 2013 ). Incorporating self-regulated learning strategies helps students to stay engaged and deal with any adversity that may come up in the process (Boekaerts, 2016 ; Peters & Kitsantas, 2010 ). A tangible way teachers can support student self-regulation is by using Zimmerman’s ( 1998 ) four-stage model of self-regulated learning support: modeling, emulation, self-control, and self-regulation (Peters, 2010 ). First, teachers explicitly model the target learning strategy that the student should acquire, pointing out key processes (modeling). Second, teachers can provide students with verbal or written support for the key processes of the learning strategy while the student attempts to emulate the modeling from the teacher (emulation). Once students can roughly emulate the learning strategy, the teacher can fade support and have the student try to do the learning strategy on their own (self-control). After students attempt it on their own, the teacher provides feedback to the student to help them improve their attempted learning strategy (self-regulation). When a student can successfully perform the learning strategy on their own, they have become self-regulated in that aspect of their learning. Students who have mastered self-regulated learning have the ability to be proactive in knowledge building and in problem solving, which are characteristics that STEM industry employers value.

• Collaboration

Collaboration occurs when students take on roles and interact with one another in groups while working to produce a product (Shear et al., 2010 ). Collaborative interactions include taking on leadership roles, making decisions, building trust, communicating, reflecting, and managing conflicts (Carpenter & Pease, 2013 ). Students who collaborate solve problems at higher levels than students who work individually because students respond to feedback and questions to create solutions that better fit the problem (Care, Scoular, & Griffin, 2016 ). Collaboration is an important skill to enhance knowledge building and problem solving. Conversations among peers can support student self-regulated learning through modeling of verbalized thinking.

• Skilled communication

“Even the most brilliant scientific discovery, if not communicated widely and accurately, is of little value” (McNutt, 2013 , p. 13). For the purpose of this paper, skilled communication is defined as types of communication used to present or explain information, not discourse communication. Skilled communicators present their ideas and demonstrate how they use relevant evidence (Shear et al., 2010 ). An important part of being able to communicate successfully is the ability to connect a product to the needs of a specific audience or client (Warin et al., 2016 ). In doing so, the students need to take into account both the media they are using and the ideas they are communicating so that it is appropriate for the audience (Claro et al., 2012 ; van Laar, van Deursen, van Dijk, & de Haan, 2017 ). Like collaboration, skilled communication is a necessary process to successfully employ knowledge construction and real-world problem solving.

Use of information and communication technology for learning

When students use information and communication technology (ICT) for learning, they are designing, creating, representing, evaluating, or improving a product, not merely demonstrating their knowledge (Koh, Chai, Benjamin, & Hong, 2015 ). In doing so, they need to choose how and when to use the ICT as well as know how to recognize credible online resources (Shear et al., 2010 ). The effective use of ICT requires self-regulation in order to use these tools independently and to keep up with technological advances. Given the continuous advancements in technology, it is essential that students know how to manage and communicate information in order to solve problems (Ainley, Fraillon, Schulz, & Gebhardt, 2016 ).

Conceptual Model of 21 st Century Skills

The six 21 st Century skills presented above are critical for students to develop to prepare for both college (National Science Board, 2016 ) and the future employment (Bybee, 2013 ; Johnson et al., 2016 ). Twenty-first century skills do not exists in isolation. By building one skill, others are reinforced. For example, knowledge construction and real-world problem solving can be enhanced by self-regulation. Likewise, collaboration requires skilled communication to build knowledge and solve problems. These skills coalesce to build the necessary toolkit for students who can learn on their own. Figure 1 shows a working hypothesis of how these six skills, (a) knowledge construction, (b) real-world problem solving, (c) skilled communication, (d) collaboration, (e) use of ICT for learning, and (f) self-regulation, interact to foster lifelong learning for student.

Working hypothesis of how 21 st Century skills work together to build a 21 st Century student

Knowledge construction and real-world problem solving are the keystones of the model and typically represent the two main goals of student-centered lessons. Knowledge construction is the conceptual formation while real-world problem solving represents the process skills that students are expected to develop. Knowledge construction and real-world problem solving feed each other in a circular fashion. Knowledge construction is built through the inquiry process of real-world problem solving. At the same time, real-world problem solving requires new knowledge to be constructed in order to solve the problem at hand. The connection between knowledge construction and real work problem solving is mediated by collaboration and communication.

While communication and collaboration allow a student to work with others to build their conceptual knowledge and work toward a solution to their real-world problem, self-regulation is an internal process that occurs simultaneously. The student’s self-regulation guides the student’s individual connections, reflections, and revisions between knowledge construction and real-world problem solving.

Information and communication technology provides tools for the students to facilitate communication and collaboration as well as other 21 st Century skills. ICT helps to simplify and assist the communication and collaboration for groups of students. ICT can help streamline the process of analysis and record keeping as well as facilitating the sharing ideas with others. It allows students to more easily document their progress and express their ideas for later reflection. Although ICT is not directly connected with other elements in the model, the use of ICT allows for the learning process to be more efficient.

The six 21 st Century skills addressed in this study, (a) knowledge construction, (b) real-world problem solving, (c) skilled communication, (d) collaboration, (e) use of ICT for learning, and (f) self-regulation, are important facets of STEM education. This study documented the extent to which each of the 21 st Century skills were present in both lesson plans and in student work at seven exemplar ISHSs. Given that the schools in the study were highly regarded, understanding the structure and student outcomes of lessons could provide a model for teachers and teacher educators. With that in mind, the study was driven by the following research questions:

To what extent do teacher lesson plans at exemplar ISHSs exhibit 21 st Century learning practices as measured by the 21 st Century Learning Design Learning Activity and Student Work Rubrics?

Do teacher lesson plans and student work samples from exemplar ISHSs show differences in rubric scores by grade level?

During the analysis of these questions, a third research question emerged regarding the duration of lessons. The question and rationale can be found in the data analysis section.

This study is part of a larger multiple instrumental case study of eight exemplar ISHSs. The larger study (Opportunity Structures for Preparation and Inspiration in STEM; OSPrI) examined the common features of successful ISHSs (Lynch et al., 2018 ; Lynch, Peters-Burton, & Ford, 2014 ). OSPrI identified 14 critical components (CC; Table 2 ) that successful ISHSs possess (Behrend et al., 2016 ; Lynch et al., 2015 ; Lynch, Means, Behrend, & Peters-Burton, 2011 ; Peters-Burton, Lynch, Behrend, & Means, 2014 ). Three of the 14 critical components involve the application of 21 st Century skills in the classroom. This study addresses these three critical components: (a) CC1: STEM focused curriculum for all, (b) CC2: reform instructional strategies and project-based learning, and (c) CC3: integrated, innovative technology use.

Cross-case analysis of the eight schools found similarities in how the schools addressed two specific critical components: CC1: college-prep, STEM focused curriculum for all and CC2: reform instructional strategies and project-based learning. From these two critical components, curriculum and instruction, four themes emerged: (a) classroom-related STEM opportunities, (b) cross-cutting school level STEM learning opportunities, (c) school-wide design for STEM opportunities, and (d) responsive design (Peters-Burton, House, Han, & Lynch, 2018 ). The theme of classroom-related STEM opportunities was characterized by the expectation that teachers act as designers of the curriculum and look beyond the typical textbook for resources. While designing the curriculum, teachers took a mastery learning approach and provided students multiple opportunities to master the material. Through the use of collaborative group projects, summative projects, culminating projects, and interdisciplinary studies, the schools demonstrated a cross-cutting school level approach to the STEM learning. School-wide STEM opportunities included a rigorous curriculum, incorporating engineering classes and/or engineering design thinking, emphasizing connections between the curriculum and real-world examples, as well as building strong collaboration between teachers. Finally, these ISHSs had systems such as data-driven decision making and supports for incoming ninth graders built into their schools as a responsive design. In summary, these schools worked to improve students’ 21 st Century skill such as collaboration, problem solving, information and media literacy, and self-directed learning (Lynch et al., 2018 ).

Research design

This study was designed as a conversion mixed methods approach (Tashakkori & Teddlie, 2003 ) in that qualitative data were transformed into quantitative data using established rubrics. Document analysis was used as a tool to identify occasions of evidence within lessons plans and student work products related to the identified 21 st Century skills (Krippendorff, 2012 ). In this conversion approach, the 21 st Century skill demonstrated qualitatively in the documents was scored using the rubrics, ergo integrating qualitative and quantitative methods in the analysis.

Participating schools

The eight exemplar ISHSs for this study came from the same quintain as used by the OSPrI project (Lynch et al., 2018 ). Because this origin project was a cross-case analysis and the IRB did not allow for school to school comparison, the data collected from individual schools was aggregated as one data source. Protocol for inclusion in the OSPrI study was that the school had no academic admission requirements, self-identified as a STEM school, was in operation for grades 9 through 12, and intentionally recruited students typically underrepresented in STEM. For more information on the demographics of the schools and the selection process, see Lynch et al., 2018 . Of the eight schools that were in the original OSPrI project, seven provided teacher lesson plans and/or student work samples during the school visit. All schools have given permission to use their actual names. The sample size from each school was inconsistent, therefore, we treated the data set as one combined group that included all seven schools.

Data sources

Student work samples and teacher lesson plans were collected during OSPrI site visits to the seven schools, which were each visited once between 2012 and 2014. Researchers requested paper copies of typical lesson plans and student work that resulted in an average performance from the lesson plan that was observed at all eight ISHSs during the site visits. Because this was a convenience sample, not all teachers submitted lesson plans, and only a few teachers submitted the student work products related to those lessons. Unfortunately, few parents consented to release student work products. As a result, 67 teacher lesson plans and 29 student work samples were collected from seven of the eight schools. We decided to keep the student work products in the descriptive portion of the analysis, but not the inferential analysis in the study because this is a unique opportunity to gain even a small insight into student work from STEM schools that were considered exemplary and served students who are typically underrepresented in STEM. Table 3 describes the content matter and grade level(s) associated collected teacher lesson plan and corresponding student work product.

Each teacher lesson plan was analyzed using the 21 st Century Learning Design (21CLD) Learning Activity Rubric and each student work product was analyzed using the 21 st Century Learning Design Student Work Rubric (SRI International, n.d.-a; SRI International, n.d.-b). These instruments were found to be valid and reliable for use in high school classrooms, and Shear et al., 2010 reports the details of the development and validation of the rubrics. Although the student work products were related to the teacher lesson plans, they were analyzed independently according to the protocol of the 21CLD rubrics. The 21CLD Activity Rubric and the 21CLD Student Work Rubric were designed by Microsoft Partner’s in Learning with a collaboration between ITL Research and SRI International (SRI International, n.d.-a; SRI International, n.d.-b). These two 21CLD rubrics were the result of a multi-year project synthesizing research-based practices that promote 21 st Century skills (Shear et al., 2010 ). The rubrics, each 44-pages in length, are available online for public use ( https://education.microsoft.com/GetTrained/ITL-Research ). The 21CLD rubrics assess teacher lesson plans or student work products on six metrics aligned with 21 st Century skills: (a) knowledge construction, (b) real-world problem solving, (c) skilled communication, (d) collaboration, (e) use of ICT for learning, and (f) self-regulation (SRI International, n.d.-a; SRI International, n.d.-b). Collaboration, knowledge construction, and use of ICT score ratings range from one to five while real-world problem solving, self-regulation, and skilled communication score ratings range from one to four.

Data analysis

The teacher lessons and student work samples were assessed on (a) knowledge construction, (b) real-world problem solving, (c) skilled communication, (d) collaboration, (e) use of ICT for learning, and (f) self-regulation using the 21CLD Learning Activity and the 21CLD Student Work Rubrics respectively. Examples of excerpts from teacher lesson plans and student work products for each category can be found in Table 4 . Two raters were used to establish interrater reliability. Both raters have a background as secondary science teachers and were trained on the use of the rubric. One rater has a terminal degree in education and the other rater is a doctoral student in education. The two raters met and discussed the rubric scores until the interrater reliability was 100%. Once consensus scores were established, tests for assumptions, descriptive, and inferential statistics were run.

During the analysis of research questions one and two, unique trends of short-term and long-term lesson plans were noted. From this, a third research question emerged from the analysis:

Are there differences in the 21 CLD Learning Activity scores of short-term lessons and long-term lessons?

The 21CLD Learning Activity and the 21CLD Student Work Rubrics required a lesson to be long-term order to assess self-regulation. The rubric defined long-term as “if students work on it for a substantive period of time” (SRI International, n.d.-a, p. 32). From our reading of the lesson plans, lessons that were scheduled for three or more days met the criterion of a substantive period of time, while lesson that were scheduled for 1 or 2 days did not meet this criterion. For the purposes of this study, we decided to refine the definition of long-term to be a lesson lasting three or more class periods and a short-term lesson lasting less than three class periods. The analyses for all research questions separated lessons into long-term and short-term in order to clarify the category of self-regulation.

The data were checked for normality, skewness, and outliers; only the teacher lesson plans met all assumptions for an ANOVA (comparison of grade levels) and t test (long-term versus short-term). Due to the small number of student work samples collected (see Table 6 ), the data related to student work did not meet the assumptions needed to run a t test therefore was not included in this analysis.

Overall rubric scores

To answer the first research question, a descriptive analysis was run for each of the six categories on the rubric and the total score (found in Tables 5 and 6 ). The average score for all teacher lesson plans was less than 2 for all six categories (out of a total of 4 or 5). Likewise, overall student work sample averages scored below 2 except on the category of Knowledge Construction. Table 6 also shows the median score for long-term student work sample categories to better describe central tendencies of the data. Figure 2 shows the distribution of total rubric scores for all teacher lesson plans. Seventeen of the 67 lessons scored a 6, the lowest possible score. Only 16 of the 67 lessons scored higher than 13 points, half of the total possible points. Out of those 16 scoring over 50%, only three lessons scored 20 points or more out of the possible 27.

Distribution of total 21CLD rubric scores for all lessons

Figure 3 illustrates the quantity of 21 st Century skills found in each lesson. Nearly 75% of the teacher lesson plans included at least one 21 st Century skill in the lesson and 67% addressed two or more 21 st Century skills. Although most of the lessons at the ISHSs introduced multiple 21 st Century skills, the overall scores for the quality were low.

Distribution of number of 21 st Century skills addressed in a lesson

21 st Century learning by grade

To answer the second research question, an ANOVA was conducted to compare lesson scores by grade level. There were no statistically significant differences between grade level scores for the total rubric score. Data were separated into short-term and long-term lessons by rubric category. There were no significant differences in short-term lessons by grade level (Fig. 4 ). However, there were significant differences across grades for long-term lessons. Total rubric score for grade 12 lessons were significantly higher than grade 9 ( p = 0.023) and grade 11 ( p = 0.032). Difference in total rubric scores for grade 12 lessons were approaching significance with grade 10 ( p = 0.063). As seen in Fig. 5 , category scores for long-term learning activities have small differences in 9th, 10th, and 11th grades but peaks noticeably in 12th grade. The exception to this trend is use of ICT which peaks in 11th grade.

The average rubric metric scores for short-term lessons, sorted by grade level for the lesson

The average rubric metric scores for long-term lessons, sorted by grade level for the lesson

Long-term versus short-term assignments

To answer the second research question, a t test with Bonferroni correction was performed to compare long-term and short-term lessons for each of the categories. A statistically significant difference was found between short-term ( N = 35) and long-term ( N = 32) lessons on total score, knowledge construction, use of ICT, self-regulation, and skilled communication (Table 7 ). The effect sizes for these categories as calculated by Hedges g (Lakens, 2013 ) were all above 0.8 indicated large effect size (Table 7 ). In all of those categories, long-term lessons scored higher than short-term lessons (Table 5 ). The category of real-world problem solving was approaching statistical significance with the t-score not showing significance [ t = − 2.67, p = .001] but a statistically significant confidence interval [− 1.23, 0.003] and a medium effect size (Table 7 ).

• 21 st Century skills

Overall, the teacher lesson plans collected at the ISHSs showed evidence of addressing 21 st Century skills. Nearly 75% of the lessons included at least one 21 st Century skill with 67% addressing two or more. Although the majority of lessons addressed multiple 21 st Century skills, the rubric scores for these lessons were low because they addressed these skills at a minimal level. For example, a minimal level of collaboration would be instructions to form a group. A high level of collaboration would include defining roles, explicit instructions on how to share responsibility, and evidence of interdependence. Only five lessons showed evidence of multiple 21 st Century skills implemented at the highest level, as measured by the 21CLD Learning Activity Rubric.

While assessing the lesson plans, we noted that more explicit instructions in the teacher lesson plans would have resulted in higher rubric scores. Placing students in groups, structuring peer feedback, and having students design a final project for a particular audience are three small changes not seen frequently in the lesson plans that are articulated in the Lesson Plan rubrics to encourage multiple 21 st Century skills. When students work in groups, they improve their collaboration and communication skills while constructing knowledge and solving problems (Care et al., 2016 ; Shear et al., 2010 ). When teachers incorporate peer feedback into their lesson, students engage in collaboration. Peer feedback also gives students the opportunity to revise their work based on feedback, increasing self-regulation (Shear et al., 2010 ; Zimmerman, 2000 ). When students design their final project for a specific target audience, rather than simply displaying their knowledge for the teacher, they work on their skilled communication processes (Claro et al., 2012 ; van Laar et al., 2017 ; Warin et al., 2016 ). In summary, placing students in groups, structuring peer feedback, and having students design a final project for a particular audience provides opportunities for students to practice 21 st Century skills.

When lessons addressed more than one 21 st Century skill, they usually demonstrated the use of collaboration or communication in real-world problem solving and knowledge construction (Care et al., 2016 ; Carpenter & Pease, 2013 ). Thirty-three lesson plans in which real-world problem solving or knowledge construction was evident, 31 showed evidence of collaboration or communication. Similarly, 13 of the 18 student work samples showed evidence of collaboration or communication when real-world problem solving or knowledge construction was practiced. The results from the indirect measures of the rubric build support for a conceptual model connecting the components of 21 st Century skills (Fig. 1 ). There was some evidence demonstrating the support that collaboration and communication have for knowledge construction and real-world problem solving.

The findings of this study point to the likelihood of self-regulation being connected to other 21 st Century skills. Each time self-regulation was present in a teacher lesson plan, there was evidence of at least one other 21 st Century skill in that lesson. Seventeen of the 23 lesson plans addressing self-regulation included at least three other 21 st Century skills, showing evidence that self-regulation is a skill that is related to knowledge construction and real-world problem solving. Our findings reflect the findings of other researchers, in that self-regulation guides the students’ individual connections, reflections, and revisions between knowledge construction and real-world problem solving (Brown et al., 1983 ; Carpenter & Pease, 2013 ; Flavell, 1987 ; Shear et al., 2010 ).

Evidence from the lessons showed that there was no consistent connection to the use of ICT and the presence of the other 21 st Century skills. ICT was seen in both low-scoring lessons as the sole 21 st Century skill, as well as in high-scoring lessons in tandem with multiple other 21 st Century skills. As in our model, technology is a tool to help facilitate but is not necessary in the development of the other 21 st Century skills (Koh et al., 2015 ; Shear et al., 2010 ). After examining the data, our model remained unchanged for all 21 st Century skills and their relationship to each other.

Grade level differences

Overall, there were no statistically significant differences in the total 21CLD scores across grade levels. This is consistent with the missions of the ISHSs in this study to shift responsibility for learning to the students by weaving 21 st Century skills throughout high school grade levels (Lynch et al., 2017 ). When looking at trends in long-term projects, there was a jump in total 21CLD score for 12th grade. Again, this aligns with the participating schools’ goals of creating an environment where students have a more independent learning experience during their senior year internships, college classes, and specialized programs CC1 (Lynch et al., 2018 ). This is consistent with the goal of many of the schools to have the students work independently during their senior year either by taking college classes, completing an internship, or taking a career specific set of classes.

Short-term vs. long-term lessons

The data showed that long-term lesson planning had significantly higher scores on the rubric as compared to the short-termed lessons. This difference is consistent with the literature regarding the need for students to have time to develop and practice skills (Lynch et al., 2017 ; NGSS Lead States, 2013 ). The extended time allows students to monitor and reflect on their progress while working toward self-regulation of the skill (Carpenter & Pease, 2013 ; English & Kitsantas, 2013 ). To truly become self-regulated, students need repeated supported attempts to be able to do it on their own (Zimmerman, 2000 ).

Although not significant, collaboration was the only rubric metric where the short-term lessons averaged a higher collaboration score than the long-term lessons. Evidence from the lessons show students worked in pairs or groups, but infrequently shared responsibility, made decisions together, or worked interdependently. This leads to the possibility that incorporating the higher levels of collaborations is difficult, even in long-term projects. In addition, evaluating the higher levels of collaboration is difficult to make based solely on documents. Observations would be required to evaluate how the students within the group were interacting with one another.

Limitations

Because this study used data collected as part of a larger study, there were several limitations. The work collected is a snapshot of the work students were doing at the time of the observation and does not allow for a clear longitudinal look at student growth over time. As stated before, the small student work sample limited what we were able to do with the analysis.

By only analyzing paper copies of the student work, it was not possible to determine a true collaboration score for many of the projects. Higher levels of collaboration such as sharing responsibility, making decisions together, and working interdependently require observation or more detailed notes from the students or teachers. Some lessons may have scored higher in the metric of collaboration had the student interactions been observed or noted.

This study confirmed the presence of all identified 21 st Century skills in the lesson plans at the selected exemplar ISHSs serving underrepresented students in STEM: (a) knowledge construction, (b) real-world problem solving, (c) skilled communication, (d) collaboration, (e) use of information and communication technology (ICT) for learning, and (f) self-regulation. In light of the patterns that emerged from the rubrics, we posit that in the lesson plans communication and collaboration are the core 21st Century skills that facilitate knowledge construction and real-world problem solving, while student self-regulation creates efficiencies resulting in improved knowledge construction and real-world problem solving. We also saw in the lesson plans that ICT provides tools to support communication and reflection which leads to knowledge construction and real-world problem solving. To further develop knowledge about how 21 st Century skills addressed in lesson plans help to support student work, our model can be a hypothesized starting point to investigate interactions.

While teachers were successful at including 21 st Century skills into lessons, very few lessons practiced higher levels of those skills. This could be an indication that high levels of 21 st Century skills are difficult to teach explicitly at the high school level. Future studies may investigate why teachers are not frequently incorporating higher level 21 st Century skills into their lessons to answer questions as to whether teachers feel that (a) they need more training on incorporating 21 st Century skills, (b) students need more practice and scaffolding to build up to higher levels of 21 st Century skills, or (c) they need more time for long-term projects to work on the higher level skills.

The use of the 21CLD rubric is a tangible way for teachers to self-assess the level of 21 st Century skills in their lessons. Self-evaluation helps encourage reflection, promote professional growth, and recommendations for new aspects of lessons (Akram & Zepeda, 2015 ; Peterson & Comeaux, 1990 ). This can also help teachers make the instructions for the development of 21 st Century skills more explicit in their lesson. In conducting a self-evaluation, teachers may realize that they do not have a deep understanding of the characteristics of 21 st Century skills. If teachers are new to incorporating these skills into their lessons, the teachers may need time to learn the skills themselves before they can incorporate them into their lessons (Yoon et al., 2015 ). Further studies may examine how teachers use the 21CLD rubric to improve their lesson.

Students need time to grapple with and learn new skills (Lynch et al., 2017 ; NGSS Lead States, 2013 ). While we were able to see evidence of higher rubric scores for 21 st Century skills for 12th grade students in the lesson plans, due to the convenience sampling of lesson plans and student work samples, we were not able to look at how students’ 21 st Century skills were built over time. There is a desire to better understand how ISHSs successfully develop these skills. This includes how schools incorporate and build the 21 st Century skills (a) within multiple lessons in one course, (b) across multiple classes over the course of a school year, and (c) throughout the students’ entire high school sequence. Future research may look at a longitudinal study that follows one student’s work over an entire school year to see how the 21CLD scores change. In addition, future studies may also look at how the short-term projects build the skills needed for the students to incorporate higher levels of 21 st Century skills in long-term projects.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Abbreviations

21 st Century Learning Design

Critical component

Information and communication technology

Inclusive STEM high school

National Assessment of Educational Progress

Next-generation science standards

Opportunity Structures for Preparation and Inspiration in STEM

Partnership for 21 st Century Learning

Programme for International Student Assessment

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics

Technology and engineering literacy

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Acknowledgments

Publication of this article was funded in part by the George Mason University Libraries Open Access Publishing Fund.

This work was conducted by the OSPrI research project, with Sharon Lynch, Tara Behrend, Erin Peters-Burton, and Barbara Means as principal investigators. Funding for OSPrI was provided by the National Science Foundation (DRL 1118851). Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of endorsement of the funding agency.

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Stehle, S.M., Peters-Burton, E.E. Developing student 21 st Century skills in selected exemplary inclusive STEM high schools. IJ STEM Ed 6 , 39 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-019-0192-1

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Original research article, digital age: the importance of 21st century skills among the undergraduates.

• 1 Academic Enhancement Division, Sunway University, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia
• 2 Centre for American Education, Sunway University, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia

The recent emphasis on refining the quality of higher education has incited insightful debates about numerous education reforms. Due to the demands of our ever-changing world, many institutions have begun to embed the 21st century skills into the curriculum design to better prepare the students for workplace success and lifelong career development. Despite its importance, there are disparities in regards to establishing an in-depth understanding of its significance. Thus, this study is aimed to investigate the perspective of undergraduate students in Malaysia on the importance of the 21st century skills for career readiness This study employed the quantitative research design wherein purposive sampling was utilized. The findings assert that data literacy is an essential skill to excel in the workplace, and similarly, problem-solving skill helps develop critical thinking skill, which contribute to the development of creative thinking skill. Recommendations are further deliberated.

Introduction

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are deemed as among the prominent catalysts in nurturing the skills demanded by various industries. Whether they are taught directly or indirectly, these skills are often predominantly embedded into the curriculum to cultivate important characteristics for students to be successful, both in the context of their education and eventually work ( Ball et al., 2016 ). 21st century skills characterize and denote a representation of the past professional skills which are now deemed obsolete due to the rapid technological change ( Kereluik et al., 2013 ; Mahmud and Wong, 2022 ). These skills are defined by broad categories comprising of thinking (e.g., creativity and innovation, critical thinking, problem solving, decision making, learning to learn), working with others (e.g., communication, collaboration/teamwork), facility with tools (e.g., information literacy, communications technology literacy), and general life skills (e.g., citizenship, life and career management, personal and social responsibility, cultural awareness). Typically, these skills are embedded into the design of higher education curriculum in preparation to join the workforce. Numerous educational and economic organizations have acknowledged the collective demand for the 21st century skills ( World Economic Forum, 2016 ; Van Laar et al., 2017 ). Nevertheless, it is argued that developing the skills can be challenging ( Jang, 2016 ; Winberg et al., 2019 ). In this regard, students must be equipped with the 21st century skills like data literacy, problem-solving, programming, and creative thinking for them to remain competitive ( Lavi et al., 2021 ). In the workforce, employees with these skills are more likely to be valued by employers ( Habets et al., 2020 ; Rios et al., 2020 ). The emergence of advanced technologies has contributed to the significant emphasis placed on the 21st century skills. Researchers predict that activities such as translating languages, driving a truck, working in retail, and even working as a surgeon will be replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) with better performance in the next 10 years ( Grace et al., 2018 ). The majority of HEIs have recognized the need to make changes to the existing curriculum in preparation for the needs of the 21st century, including the emphasis on new skills. As part of an ongoing effort for educational reform at the institutional level, numerous HEIs are actively engaging stakeholders to enhance and revamp the necessary 21st century skills development. Therefore, it is important for students to prepare themselves to avoid from being eliminated by their future workplace. Graduates who keep up and adhere with their organizations (i.e., employers) by completing assigned tasks with excellent performance are believed to be well-equipped with the 21st century skills, subsequently justifying its importance for graduates to secure and develop their career progression ( Ghafar, 2020 ). Despite the established significance of acquiring the 21st century skills, it is surprising to notice that many people have limited exposure to it. The majority of them believe that such issue resulted from the absence of clear and proper guidance on how to develop these critical skills, thus making them to feel helpless despite their eagerness to learn. Eventually, these people will lose advantage over others who are well-equipped with the 21st century skills when dealing with problems in the modern society ( Joynes et al., 2019 ). Previous studies revealed that 21st-century skills are essential to be acquired due to its importance in the workforce and society. However, there are limited assessments that can evaluate 21st century capabilities. Meanwhile, standardized examinations can only examine a small portion of the critical skills and information acquired by students. According to Silva (2009) , the 21st century skills are not new yet it is essential as younger employees must be able to identify and analyze information from other sources and use it to make decisions and create new ideas. Therefore, it is important to raise the awareness of undergraduate students in grasping 21st century skills. Thus, this study aims to examine the importance of the 21st century skills required by undergraduate students in the digital age.

Literature review

Previous studies defined the 21st century skills as a broad set of knowledge, skills, work habits, and character traits that educators, school reformers, college professors, and employers believe to be critically important for students to succeed in today’s world, particularly in collegiate programs as well as contemporary careers and workplaces ( The Glossary of Education Reform, 2016 ; Rajaratenam, 2019 ; Davis, 2021 ). The basic premise behind the concept of the 21st century skills is that students must be taught with in-demand and universally applicable skills. Therefore, educational institutions like schools, colleges, and universities must prioritize on the effective teaching of such skills to students. In other words, 21st century students need to learn relevant skills that reflect the demands placed upon them in the global modern world rather than skills learned by students in the 20th century ( Aabla, 2017 ). In the subsequent paragraphs, four 21st century skills are deliberated to homogenize the current educational initiatives with the fourth industrial revolution and its associated innovations and technologies ( Miranda et al., 2021 ). In a similar vein, a conceptual framework, TPACK framework by Koehler et al. (2014) , and 21st century framework developed by Education Performance and Delivery Unit Malaysia (PADU) were also utilized the guiding principles. One of the critical 21st century skills required by university students is data literacy, which is the ability to read, understand, and interpret data. It plays an important role in social studies education where the prevalence of data visualization encountered by students will only be increased by the improvement and access to technologies. In this regard, educational institutions like schools are regarded as a preferable place to begin accumulating data literacy knowledge as it helps individuals to engage on the inundation of information at an earlier age ( Raffaghelli, 2020 ; Robertson and Tisdall, 2020 ; Shreiner, 2020 ). Some universities even offer extra workshops to improve data literacy skill among their students along with recommending and providing them with access to data literacy tools. this subsequently enables them to master the skill before entering the job market. Furthermore, data literacy skill also acts as a data-sharing tool. According to Enakrire (2020) and Palsdottir (2021) , researchers equipped with data literacy skill are more likely to understand the existing data presented and link various data together to convert it into useful information for their own use. For instance, studying the number of COVID-19 cases every day facilitates the effort to tabulate a graph that illustrates the amount of daily confirmed cases of COVID-19 that allows researchers to examine the trend and prepare for upcoming situations. Therefore, being proficient in data is an important skill for university students to stay competitive in the 21st century. The popularity of data visualization viewed by students will only grow as a technology that improves and becomes more accessible. Furthermore, researchers equipped with data literacy skill are more likely to comprehend current data and combine disparate datasets to create usable information.

Often referred as the ability to identify underlying problems and actively seeking for solutions, problem-solving has been propounded as another crucial skill to be acquired by students in the 21st century. Within the education sector, several authors ( Furino, 2012 ; Karakoyun and Lindberg, 2020 ; Demir, 2021 ) mentioned that problem-solving has been highlighted as an essential skill in schools after the digital literacy skill and it is now introduced into students’ learning process to stimulate their higher-order thinking skills. Based on the recent systematic review studied by Mahmud et al. (2021) , it reveals that the students possess different skills, including strategic thinking and problem-solving skills in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis. This can be further exemplified when schools started to modify their syllabus by inserting higher-order thinking questions to encourage students to think deeply and more critical. Moreover, problem-solving is the most investigated 21st century skill after digital literacy and critical thinking particularly when it comes to determining the 21st century skills within individuals. Generally, there are many ways to assess the problem-solving ability of a person. A commonly used method is performance test ( Arslangilay, 2019 ; Van Laar et al., 2020 ) by recording the number of attempts that a person used to solve a problem. In summary, past studies advocate on the need for students to equip themselves with problem-solving skill in this modern era. Following such awareness, the education sector has also begun to include higher-order thinking questions to boost problem-solving skill among their students. Additionally, problem-solving skill is highly involved in 21st century studies to examine its significance to the era of big data.

Another important 21st century skill that has been emphasized in the curriculum is programming, which refers to the ability of writing a computer program to ease in data processing. Programming skill can foster the skills and attitudes that are strongly associated with 21st century and digital competency. Therefore, basic computing courses should be introduced since primary school because it builds cognitive dimensions and benefits students with programming and computer skills along with other learning competencies across various subjects at an early age, which are essential for their future career. It also provides students with impactful learning experience, which can be proven by the high level of students’ overall satisfaction ( Kunpitak, 2019 ; Theobold and Hancock, 2019 ; Nouri et al., 2020 ; Wong and Cheung, 2020 ). Moreover, programming skill is broadly needed in various sectors nowadays. Instead of the need for coding skill among programmers, there are numerous careers that require coding skill. Important infrastructures such as healthcare, communication, transportation, and defense also expect improvement in software technologies to support their digital platforms ( Mittal, 2020 ). For instance, the medical department uses mathematical modeling to predict how social distancing can affect the number of COVID-19 cases. Hence, the result can be analyzed and efficient regulations of hygiene measures can be introduced to the public to reduce the number of cases. In conclusion, programming skill is one of the important 21st century skills that should be acquired by students as it builds their cognitive dimension, provides them with fruitful learning experience, and prepares them for their professional careers.

The ability to think creatively is crucial because it allows individuals to see problems and situations in innovative ways. However, the development of students’ creative thinking skill has received limited attention. As a result, many graduates struggle to secure job opportunities due to a lack of creativity ( Wyse and Ferrari, 2014 ). As creativity is dependent on information and does not occur in a second, many employees wish that they are more creative and were exposed to creative thinking during their schooling years. However, people rarely use their creative thinking skill to its full potential. Some academics even claim that the educational system inhibits their creativity as most educational institutions do not focus on teaching, practicing, and applying current information to generate creative ideas and problem-solving solutions. Furthermore, creative thinking skill allows people to stand out at the workplace when providing constructive ideas to deal with problems. As mentioned by Anjarwati et al. (2018) , Atmojo and Sajidan (2020) , and Azid and Md-Ali (2020) , thinking fluently, which correlates to creative thinking, enables people to solve problems with a wide range of solutions. This is because they can easily produce ideas and solutions when faced with challenges. In such instance, more solutions can be generated with their ability to think outside the box instead of merely generating one or two general ideas. Occasionally, producing unique solutions is the way to achieve differentiation which allows one to be prominent from others. Generally, people who are well-equipped with creative thinking skill can integrate different situations quickly as compared to others as well as having the ability to generate various kinds of ideas when they are faced with problems. Therefore, it is important to invest prominent attention on equipping students with creative thinking skill to avoid them from having a lack of imagination towards an object as well as the tendency to avoid any challenges in the future.

Research methodology

This study had employed the quantitative research design by distributing a self-developed survey to the undergraduate students to examine their perceptions towards the importance of data literacy skill, problem-solving skill, programming skill, and creative thinking skill in the digital era. The survey used in this study comprised four sections pertaining to data literacy skill, problem-solving skill, programming skill, and creative thinking skill. Cronbach’s Alpha and Explanatory Factor Analysis (EFA) was conducted to determine both the reliability and validity of the instrument used. The data collected from the survey was analyzed using descriptive statistics. In this regard, frequency and percentage was used to calculate the number of respondents who considered data literacy, problem-solving, programming, and creative thinking as important 21st century skills. The Graduate Tracer Study Executive Report 2010 by the Ministry of Higher Education discovered that 24.6% of the 174, 464 graduates were jobless 6 months after graduation ( Ministry of Higher Education [MoHE], 2021 ). The circumstance raises questions on the HEIs “product,” and this is consistent with the study target population–students pursuing their undergraduate courses in Malaysia. The group was purposively sampled, and deemed suitable as the study probed at scrutinizing the importance of the 21st century skills among the undergraduates, considering the immense number of graduates entering the labor market. The study began by reviewing past articles and studies on the 21st century skills to identify the existing arguments and empirical evidence. This was done by extracting information from more than 300 academic journals and transferring it into a review matrix, which helped in the process of constructing the research objective and research questions. The survey questionnaire was then designed, finalized, and validated. It was then distributed to the targeted respondents via social media such as Telegram, WhatsApp and Instagram. A total of 101 completed survey questionnaires were gathered from undergraduate students between 18 and 25 years old who enrolled in a bachelor’s degree course in Malaysia. The respondents provided their responses to 25 items using a 5-point Likert scale, from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5). All data were then processed and analyzed in order to find the answers to the research questions.

Findings and discussion

Table 1 shows the analysis results on the importance of data literacy skills among the undergraduate students in the digital age. It can be seen that the majority of respondents agreed with Item 1 where data literacy skill can be applied to solve numerous problems in the social studies sector, such as to predict future outcomes. Following that, 44 respondents strongly agreed with Item 2 while 18 respondents had stated their neutral stand. This suggests that people are now living in a big data era; therefore, it is better to equip this skill at the first opportunity to fit into the current situation. A study by Robertson and Tisdall (2020) mentioned that introducing data literacy into the school curriculum is highly recommended because the younger generation is curious about data, possesses a high concern about data sharing issues, and wishes to have a deeper understanding about the matter. Furthermore, 47.5% of the respondents strongly agreed with Item 3. As data becomes more accessible, students are willing to investigate data and use their data understanding in different contexts. This not only allows them to express themselves but also makes them become more knowledgeable and skillful ( Deahl, 2014 ). As a result, these students are more intelligent when dealing with challenges. In addition, Item 5 had the highest percentage of respondents (55.4%) who strongly agreed with the notion. This might due to the fact that students are dissatisfied with their current data literacy knowledge and would like to have a closer approach to this skill. This is supported by Bhargava and D’Ignazio (2015) who stated that data literacy tools can better assist learners’ competency in data literacy by providing a stronger support system. On the contrary, Item 4 had the most disagreeing respondents (3.0%). One potential reason for this result is that respondents consider data literacy as an indispensable skill in school, especially when dealing with data for their coursework. As noted by Sickler et al. (2021) , students require data literacy skill to transfer the underlying meaning of professional and large-scale data into their coursework based on their understanding. According to Chinien and Boutin (2011) , data literacy is recognized as one of the most beneficial skills for the 21st century as it brings positive impact to a valuable knowledge-based economy.

Table 1. Data literacy skill.

Table 2 presents results on the significance of problem-solving skill among the undergraduate students in the big data era. It was found that 90.1% of the respondents agreed with Item 1 where problem-solving skill should be embedded in the curriculum of undergraduate courses. This is because the majority of university students wish to excel in this skill. According to Rodzalan and Saat (2015) , lecturers are encouraged to provide students with challenging tasks that can prompt them to perform critical thinking when solving the assigned problems. Whereas, Item 2 received the highest number of strong agreement from a total of 65 respondents. One possible reason is that students believe that the problem-solving process can stimulate other 21st century skills within them, such as innovation and perseverance. As noted by Furino (2012) , problem-based learning provides students with the opportunity to experience potential problems that they may encounter in real life. Next, 13 respondents held a neutral stance on Item 3 while 46 and 42 respondents agreed and strongly agreed with the notion. Such result can be due to the students’ mindset where improvement in ICT literacy skill can lead to better thinking skill, which indirectly links to the improvement in problem-solving skill. This is supported by Karyotaki and Drigas (2016) who believe that ICT tools can provide support to students during the entire problem-solving process to enhance their elaboration and the making of evidence-based reasoning. Meanwhile, Item 4 yielded the highest number of agreement (94.1%) where 43 respondents agreed and 52 respondents strongly agreed with the statement. One possible explanation is that when solving a problem in a group, students need to actively engage with their groupmates and think critically to produce an ideal solution. Therefore, it is suggested to include problem-solving skill into the curriculum as it is crucial for the acquisition of the 21st century skills ( Demir, 2021 ). Following that, Item 5 had the second-highest number of strong agreement with a total of 62 respondents who strongly agreed with the statement. This is because at the workplace, individuals are often required to solve problems in a good manner to avoid conflicts between employees. According to Karakoyun and Lindberg (2020) , problem-solving is the second most important skill after digital literacy in the 21st century workforce. Meanwhile, no disagreement was recorded for Items 2 to 4. The respondents who held a strong agreement for all 5 items contributed to an average of 91.5% of agreement.

Table 2. Problem-solving skill.

Table 3 contains results on the importance of programming skill for the undergraduate students in the big data era. It can be seen that Item 1 yielded 80.2% of agreement from the respondents. This is because almost everything is digitalized nowadays and this makes programming as among the highly demanded skill for one to keep pace with the current trends. Other than developing computational skill, programming education can also aid in fostering a more general character attitude that is related to the 21st century skills and digital competency ( Nouri et al., 2020 ). Furthermore, Item 4 received an agreement of 79.2% from the respondents. One possible reason is that the young generation must be equipped with programming skill to keep up with the digital transformation where programming skill is broadly needed in various sectors nowadays. Moreover, the importance of programming skill in this big data era is no longer limited to programmers but also various other careers. This is supported by Mittal (2020) who stated that important infrastructures such as healthcare, communication, transportation, and defense also expect improvement in software technologies to support their digital platforms. Whereas, 85 respondents agreed with Item 5, which deduced that programming encompasses the ability to write codes as well as the ability to analyze a situation and recognize critical components, model data, and processes in order to design specific programs. As mentioned by Wong and Cheung (2020) , programming skill can strengthen students’ thinking skill, problem-solving skill, and creativity by requiring them to set up their own games, subsequently enhancing their programming knowledge during the programming curriculum. Ergo, given the importance of attaining these skills, it can be postulated that programming is one of the 21st century skills that has great importance for future generations, being a process of applying various command sets for computer programming, problem solving and performing a specific task by computers ( Business Dictionary, 2017 ). The majority of respondents agreed with almost all of the items except for Item 3 where 30.7% of the respondents had a neutral stand while 9.9% of them disagreed with the statement. A possible explanation for this result is the respondents believe that primary students are too young to learn programming skill. According to Antonitsch (2015) , there is another viewpoint that sees potential disadvantages in children’s development when they are exposed to the computer at an early age. Such viewpoint can be found in both the educational thought of anthroposophical philosophy and the well-known scientific publications. All the items received disagreement from a small proportion of respondents.

Table 3. Programming skill.

Table 4 presents results on the importance of creative thinking skill for the undergraduate students in the big data era. For item 1, 60 respondents agreed, 36 respondents were neutral, and 5 respondents disagreed that the development of creative thinking skill has less focus in the educational system. Elder and Paul (2001) have emphasized the importance of fostering creative thinking skill in students’ education because it allows them to handle both academic and non-academic situations with proper solutions. This indicates that educational institutions should put more attention on practicing critical thinking skill as it allows students to think critically and effectively find solutions, thus helping them to succeed in the future career path. Meanwhile, the majority of respondents agreed with Item 2 where creative thinking is not only important to their daily life but also to jobs that require interaction between individuals. Finkelman (2001) highlighted that professionals who work in the human health field, such as psychologists, counselors, and educationists, must think critically in both practice and management. Creative thinking also leads to higher leadership skill, particularly in managerial roles. Next, Item 3 received a high agreement level from the respondents. Despite the ability to generate ideas from their own experience and knowledge, individuals with creative thinking skill can also obtain ideas from their surroundings ( Allen and Gerras, 2009 ), thus enabling them to identify the perfect solution to any difficulties experienced in the future. Besides, Item 4 had the highest percentage of agreed respondents (90.1%). One reason for this result is that the respondents believe that individuals with creative thinking skill can immediately generate unique ideas when seeing a problem at first glance. According to Atmojo and Sajidan (2020) , individuals with creative thinking skills can produce alternative solutions to problems easily while tend to obey the originality rule of ideas. Furthermore, 86.1% of the respondents agreed with Item 5. One possible explanation is that problem-based learning requires students to think out of the box and from various perspectives to obtain the desired solution. As noted by Anjarwati et al. (2018) , problem-based learning encourages high students involvement by motivating them to find self-concept. It also allows students to think and solve problems creatively using their own ideas.

Table 4. Creative thinking skill.

In summary, this research aims to identify the importance of data literacy, problem-solving, programming, and creative thinking skills in the big data era from the perspective of undergraduate students in Malaysia. The findings indicate that the majority of respondents agreed that data literacy is indeed a necessary skill in the digital world because it allows people to effectively deal with data-related issues. It was also found that data literacy skill possesses an important role in educational institutions. Therefore, the respondents proposed that data literacy skill should be integrated into the school curriculum to expose it to the young generation and cultivate their interests to data at an early age. Additionally, data literacy is also known as a medium for data sharing. Such skill is particularly helpful for students to interpret any forms of data. Hence, it is important to equip students with data literacy skill so that they can easily disclose information presented in raw data. For young learners to gain the 21st century skills, problem-solving skill should be incorporated into the learning process. The survey results showed that problem-solving skill should be included in the curriculum for students to increase their academic achievement and become more adventurous and creative. Furthermore, the findings also showed that problem-solving skill can help to develop critical thinking skill and improve collaborative problem-solving skill. Thus, students must be exposed to problem-solving skill as they will be required to solve problems and issues in their future careers. The results also reported an overall agreement on the strong interrelation between programming skill and the 21st century skills. Programming has become an essential skill in the 21st century. Therefore, every individual should be equipped with such skill to keep pace with the digital revolution as every sector now requires a digital platform, which is linked to the use of programming skill in platform design. As most educational institutions have begun to introduce programming skill into their curriculum, most respondents agreed that programming skill can strengthen their thinking skill, problem-solving skill, and creativity. They further advocate that the younger generation should be introduced to programming at the early stage skills for them to keep up with the digital transition. However, a small proportion of the respondents believe that it is unnecessary to embed programming skill into primary school education. From the findings, this study concludes that students should have creative thinking skill because it is a must-have ability to remain competitive and relevant in the 21st century. However, most educational institutions are lacking in the attention to creative thinking skill, hence causing graduates to face significant difficulty to secure their jobs. Thus, students must be encouraged to develop creative thinking skill as it allows them to generate unique ideas. This is in line with the respondents’ agreement that creative thinking enables them to think and produce solutions to 21st century problems from various perspectives.

Recommendations

Due to the importance of data literacy skill in this data-saturated world, students will require such skill to study and process the open data for them to be relevant. It is recommended that problem-solving skill to be incorporated into the learning process in which real-life situations can be utilized to solve problems independently while receiving minimal guidance. This will train them to expect future events and be prepared to handle any potential problems and issues in the future. However, problem-solving skill is limited to specific courses only. Therefore, educational institutions may want to revise their curriculum to integrate problem-solving skill across a wider range of areas. Echoing similar notion, programming skill should be introduced at school level as students will likely start to develop interest at that juncture. For instance, schools can organize free programming courses and host programming competitions to encourage students’ participation and interest in programming. This will cultivate an impactful learning experience to students and boost their interest in this field. In addition, this study also found that creative thinking skill can develop students’ creativity to solve real-life problems. Thus, it is recommended for the government to improve the current education system by integrating more problem-based learning to improve students’ creative thinking skill such as group-based activities to apply real-life solutions. This in turn will prompt them to think creatively in solving the assigned tasks with their group members, which will eventually help them to simulate creative solutions when faced with similar problems in the future workplace. Consequently, this will produce future employees with the competency to provide constructive and creative solutions to problems. Besides, educators must also be encouraged to review best strategies for engaging students to develop the 21st century skills by connecting the content to real-life experiences to promote the sound application of the 21st century skills in actual field of work. Today, technology holds the power of transforming our present into a radiant future. Evolving skills set such as digital literacy and digital citizenship needed to undergo digital transformation are in high demand. There is a need to have a common understanding of digital literacy and skills that can be adopted by all stakeholders as a global standard, which can be seen as part of digital intelligence (DQ), which is recognized by the IEEE SA (2021). Therefore, it is recommended for future research to elicit further elaboration from a research emulating a tracer’s study to track the progress of 21st century in order to gain more insights for more accurate conclusions to be drawn. Future research can also use cluster sampling to ensure that the number of participants from each age group is the same. This will ensure the accuracy of responses as all age groups will be equally represented, thus eliminating bias among the respondents. In conclusion, the education system should consider problem-based learning as a possible technique to enhance creative thinking skill among students.

Data availability statement

The original contributions presented in this study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Author contributions

MM: conceptualization, data curation, and writing – original draft. SW: formal analysis and writing – review and editing. MM and SW: investigation and methodology. Both authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This work was supported by the Sunway University.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Keywords : 21st century skills, digital age, undergraduates, workplace, curriculum

Citation: Mahmud MM and Wong SF (2022) Digital age: The importance of 21st century skills among the undergraduates. Front. Educ. 7:950553. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2022.950553

Received: 23 May 2022; Accepted: 05 October 2022; Published: 01 November 2022.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2022 Mahmud and Wong. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Shiau Foong Wong, [email protected]

This article is part of the Research Topic

Education and Innovative Perspectives in Higher Education

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• Published: 28 November 2019

Physics education research for 21 st century learning

• Lei Bao   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3348-4198 1 &
• Kathleen Koenig 2  

Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Science Education Research volume  1 , Article number:  2 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

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Education goals have evolved to emphasize student acquisition of the knowledge and attributes necessary to successfully contribute to the workforce and global economy of the twenty-first Century. The new education standards emphasize higher end skills including reasoning, creativity, and open problem solving. Although there is substantial research evidence and consensus around identifying essential twenty-first Century skills, there is a lack of research that focuses on how the related subskills interact and develop over time. This paper provides a brief review of physics education research as a means for providing a context towards future work in promoting deep learning and fostering abilities in high-end reasoning. Through a synthesis of the literature around twenty-first Century skills and physics education, a set of concretely defined education and research goals are suggested for future research, along with how these may impact the next generation physics courses and how physics should be taught in the future.

Introduction

Education is the primary service offered by society to prepare its future generation workforce. The goals of education should therefore meet the demands of the changing world. The concept of learner-centered, active learning has broad, growing support in the research literature as an empirically validated teaching practice that best promotes learning for modern day students (Freeman et al., 2014 ). It stems out of the constructivist view of learning, which emphasizes that it is the learner who needs to actively construct knowledge and the teacher should assume the role of a facilitator rather than the source of knowledge. As implied by the constructivist view, learner-centered education usually emphasizes active-engagement and inquiry style teaching-learning methods, in which the learners can effectively construct their understanding under the guidance of instruction. The learner-centered education also requires educators and researchers to focus their efforts on the learners’ needs, not only to deliver effective teaching-learning approaches, but also to continuously align instructional practices to the education goals of the times. The goals of introductory college courses in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines have constantly evolved from some notion of weed-out courses that emphasize content drilling, to the current constructivist active-engagement type of learning that promotes interest in STEM careers and fosters high-end cognitive abilities.

Following the conceptually defined framework of twenty-first Century teaching and learning, this paper aims to provide contextualized operational definitions of the goals for twenty-first Century learning in physics (and STEM in general) as well as the rationale for the importance of these outcomes for current students. Aligning to the twenty-first Century learning goals, research in physics education is briefly reviewed to provide a context towards future work in promoting deep learning and fostering abilities in high-end reasoning in parallel. Through a synthesis of the literature around twenty-first Century skills and physics education, a set of concretely defined education and research goals are suggested for future research. These goals include: domain-specific research in physics learning; fostering scientific reasoning abilities that are transferable across the STEM disciplines; and dissemination of research-validated curriculum and approaches to teaching and learning. Although this review has a focus on physics education research (PER), it is beneficial to expand the perspective to view physics education in the broader context of STEM learning. Therefore, much of the discussion will blend PER with STEM education as a continuum body of work on teaching and learning.

Education goals for twenty-first century learning

Education goals have evolved to emphasize student acquisition of essential “21 st Century skills”, which define the knowledge and attributes necessary to successfully contribute to the workforce and global economy of the 21st Century (National Research Council, 2011 , 2012a ). In general, these standards seek to transition from emphasizing content-based drilling and memorization towards fostering higher-end skills including reasoning, creativity, and open problem solving (United States Chamber of Commerce, 2017 ). Initiatives on advancing twenty-first Century education focus on skills that converge on three broad clusters: cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal, all of which include a rich set of sub-dimensions.

Within the cognitive domain, multiple competencies have been proposed, including deep learning, non-routine problem solving, systems thinking, critical thinking, computational and information literacy, reasoning and argumentation, and innovation (National Research Council, 2012b ; National Science and Technology Council, 2018 ). Interpersonal skills are those necessary for relating to others, including the ability to work creatively and collaboratively as well as communicate clearly. Intrapersonal skills, on the other hand, reside within the individual and include metacognitive thinking, adaptability, and self-management. These involve the ability to adjust one’s strategy or approach along with the ability to work towards important goals without significant distraction, both essential for sustained success in long-term problem solving and career development.

Although many descriptions exist for what qualifies as twenty-first Century skills, student abilities in scientific reasoning and critical thinking are the most commonly noted and widely studied. They are highly connected with the other cognitive skills of problem solving, decision making, and creative thinking (Bailin, 1996 ; Facione, 1990 ; Fisher, 2001 ; Lipman, 2003 ; Marzano et al., 1988 ), and have been important educational goals since the 1980s (Binkley et al., 2010 ; NCET, 1987 ). As a result, they play a foundational role in defining, assessing, and developing twenty-first Century skills.

The literature for critical thinking is extensive (Bangert-Drowns & Bankert, 1990 ; Facione, 1990 ; Glaser, 1941 ). Various definitions exist with common underlying principles. Broadly defined, critical thinking is the application of the cognitive skills and strategies that aim for and support evidence-based decision making. It is the thinking involved in solving problems, formulating inferences, calculating likelihoods, and making decisions (Halpern, 1999 ). It is the “reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do” (Ennis, 1993 ). Critical thinking is recognized as a way to understand and evaluate subject matter; producing reliable knowledge and improving thinking itself (Paul, 1990 ; Siegel, 1988 ).

The notion of scientific reasoning is often used to label the set of skills that support critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity in STEM. Broadly defined, scientific reasoning includes the thinking and reasoning skills involved in inquiry, experimentation, evidence evaluation, inference and argument that support the formation and modification of concepts and theories about the natural world; such as the ability to systematically explore a problem, formulate and test hypotheses, manipulate and isolate variables, and observe and evaluate consequences (Bao et al., 2009 ; Zimmerman, 2000 ). Critical thinking and scientific reasoning share many features, where both emphasize evidence-based decision making in multivariable causal conditions. Critical thinking can be promoted through the development of scientific reasoning, which includes student ability to reach a reliable conclusion after identifying a question, formulating hypotheses, gathering relevant data, and logically testing and evaluating the hypothesis. In this way, scientific reasoning can be viewed as a scientific domain instantiation of critical thinking in the context of STEM learning.

In STEM learning, cognitive aspects of the twenty-first Century skills aim to develop reasoning skills, critical thinking skills, and deep understanding, all of which allow students to develop well connected expert-like knowledge structures and engage in meaningful scientific inquiry and problem solving. Within physics education, a core component of STEM education, the learning of conceptual understanding and problem solving remains a current emphasis. However, the fast-changing work environment and technology-driven world require a new set of core knowledge, skills, and habits of mind to solve complex interdisciplinary problems, gather and evaluate evidence, and make sense of information from a variety of sources (Tanenbaum, 2016 ). The education goals in physics are transitioning towards ability fostering as well as extension and integration with other STEM disciplines. Although curriculum that supports these goals is limited, there are a number of attempts, particularly in developing active learning classrooms and inquiry-based laboratory activities, which have demonstrated success. Some of these are described later in this paper as they provide a foundation for future work in physics education.

Interpersonal skills, such as communication and collaboration, are also essential for twenty-first Century problem-solving tasks, which are often open-ended, complex, and team-based. As the world becomes more connected in a multitude of dimensions, tackling significant problems involving complex systems often goes beyond the individual and requires working with others who are increasingly from culturally diverse backgrounds. Due to the rise of communication technologies, being able to articulate thoughts and ideas in a variety of formats and contexts is crucial, as well as the ability to effectively listen or observe to decipher meaning. Interpersonal skills can be promoted by integrating group-learning experiences into the classroom setting, while providing students with the opportunity to engage in open-ended tasks with a team of peer learners who may propose more than one plausible solution. These experiences should be designed such that students must work collaboratively and responsibly in teams to develop creative solutions, which are later disseminated through informative presentations and clearly written scientific reports. Although educational settings in general have moved to providing students with more and more opportunities for collaborative learning, a lack of effective assessments for these important skills has been a limiting factor for producing informative research and widespread implementation. See Liu ( 2010 ) for an overview of measurement instruments reported in the research literature.

Intrapersonal skills are based on the individual and include the ability to manage one’s behavior and emotions to achieve goals. These are especially important for adapting in the fast-evolving collaborative modern work environment and for learning new tasks to solve increasingly challenging interdisciplinary problems, both of which require intellectual openness, work ethic, initiative, and metacognition, to name a few. These skills can be promoted using instruction which, for example, includes metacognitive learning strategies, provides opportunities to make choices and set goals for learning, and explicitly connects to everyday life events. However, like interpersonal skills, the availability of relevant assessments challenges advancement in this area. In this review, the vast amount of studies on interpersonal and intrapersonal skills will not be discussed in order to keep the main focus on the cognitive side of skills and reasoning.

The purpose behind discussing twenty-first Century skills is that this set of skills provides important guidance for establishing essential education goals for modern society and learners. However, although there is substantial research evidence and consensus around identifying necessary twenty-first Century skills, there is a lack of research that focuses on how the related subskills interact and develop over time (Reimers & Chung, 2016 ), with much of the existing research residing in academic literature that is focused on psychology rather than education systems (National Research Council, 2012a ). Therefore, a major and challenging task for discipline-based education researchers and educators is to operationally define discipline-specific goals that align with the twenty-first Century skills for each of the STEM fields. In the following sections, this paper will provide a limited vision of the research endeavors in physics education that can translate the past and current success into sustained impact for twenty-first Century teaching and learning.

Proposed education and research goals

Physics education research (PER) is often considered an early pioneer in discipline-based education research (National Research Council, 2012c ), with well-established, broad, and influential outcomes (e.g., Hake, 1998 ; Hsu, Brewe, Foster, & Harper, 2004 ; McDermott & Redish, 1999 ; Meltzer & Thornton, 2012 ). Through the integration of twenty-first Century skills with the PER literature, a set of broadly defined education and research goals is proposed for future PER work:

Discipline-specific deep learning: Cognitive and education research involving physics learning has established a rich literature on student learning behaviors along with a number of frameworks. Some of the popular frameworks include conceptual understanding and concept change, problem solving, knowledge structure, deep learning, and knowledge integration. Aligned with twenty-first Century skills, future research in physics learning should aim to integrate the multiple areas of existing work, such that they help students develop well integrated knowledge structures in order to achieve deep leaning in physics.

Fostering scientific reasoning for transfer across STEM disciplines: The broad literature in physics learning and scientific reasoning can provide a solid foundation to further develop effective physics education approaches, such as active engagement instruction and inquiry labs, specifically targeting scientific inquiry abilities and reasoning skills. Since scientific reasoning is a more domain-general cognitive ability, success in physics can also more readily inform research and education practices in other STEM fields.

Research, development, assessment, and dissemination of effective education approaches: Developing and maintaining a supportive infrastructure of education research and implementation has always been a challenge, not only in physics but in all STEM areas. The twenty-first Century education requires researchers and instructors across STEM to work together as an extended community in order to construct a sustainable integrated STEM education environment. Through this new infrastructure, effective team-based inquiry learning and meaningful assessment can be delivered to help students develop a comprehensive skills set including deep understanding and scientific reasoning, as well as communication and other non-cognitive abilities.

The suggested research will generate understanding and resources to support education practices that meet the requirements of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), which explicitly emphasize three areas of learning including disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts, and practices (National Research Council, 2012b ). The first goal for promoting deep learning of disciplinary knowledge corresponds well to the NGSS emphasis on disciplinary core ideas, which play a central role in helping students develop well integrated knowledge structures to achieve deep understanding. The second goal on fostering transferable scientific reasoning skills supports the NGSS emphasis on crosscutting concepts and practices. Scientific reasoning skills are crosscutting cognitive abilities that are essential to the development of domain-general concepts and modeling strategies. In addition, the development of scientific reasoning requires inquiry-based learning and practices. Therefore, research on scientific reasoning can produce a valuable knowledge base on education means that are effective for developing crosscutting concepts and promoting meaningful practices in STEM. The third research goal addresses the challenge in the assessment of high-end skills and the dissemination of effective educational approaches, which supports all NGSS initiatives to ensure sustainable development and lasting impact. The following sections will discuss the research literature that provides the foundation for these three research goals and identify the specific challenges that will need to be addressed in future work.

Promoting deep learning in physics education

Physics education for the twenty-first Century aims to foster high-end reasoning skills and promote deep conceptual understanding. However, many traditional education systems place strong emphasis on only problem solving with the expectation that students obtain deep conceptual understanding through repetitive problem-solving practices, which often doesn’t occur (Alonso, 1992 ). This focus on problem solving has been shown to have limitations as a number of studies have revealed disconnections between learning conceptual understanding and problem-solving skills (Chiu, 2001 ; Chiu, Guo, & Treagust, 2007 ; Hoellwarth, Moelter, & Knight, 2005 ; Kim & Pak, 2002 ; Nakhleh, 1993 ; Nakhleh & Mitchell, 1993 ; Nurrenbern & Pickering, 1987 ; Stamovlasis, Tsaparlis, Kamilatos, Papaoikonomou, & Zarotiadou, 2005 ). In fact, drilling in problem solving may actually promote memorization of context-specific solutions with minimal generalization rather than transitioning students from novices to experts.

Towards conceptual understanding and learning, many models and definitions have been established to study and describe student conceptual knowledge states and development. For example, students coming into a physics classroom often hold deeply rooted, stable understandings that differ from expert conceptions. These are commonly referred to as misconceptions or alternative conceptions (Clement, 1982 ; Duit & Treagust, 2003 ; Dykstra Jr, Boyle, & Monarch, 1992 ; Halloun & Hestenes, 1985a , 1985b ). Such students’ conceptions are context dependent and exist as disconnected knowledge fragments, which are strongly situated within specific contexts (Bao & Redish, 2001 , 2006 ; Minstrell, 1992 ).

In modeling students’ knowledge structures, DiSessa’s proposed phenomenological primitives (p-prim) describe a learner’s implicit thinking, cued from specific contexts, as an underpinning cognitive construct for a learner’s expressed conception (DiSessa, 1993 ; Smith III, DiSessa, & Roschelle, 1994 ). Facets, on the other hand, map between the implicit p-prim and concrete statements of beliefs and are developed as discrete and independent units of thought, knowledge, or strategies used by individuals to address specific situations (Minstrell, 1992 ). Ontological categories, defined by Chi, describe student reasoning in the most general sense. Chi believed that these are distinct, stable, and constraining, and that a core reason behind novices’ difficulties in physics is that they think of physics within the category of matter instead of processes (Chi, 1992 ; Chi & Slotta, 1993 ; Chi, Slotta, & De Leeuw, 1994 ; Slotta, Chi, & Joram, 1995 ). More details on conceptual learning and problem solving are well summarized in the literature (Hsu et al., 2004 ; McDermott & Redish, 1999 ), from which a common theme emerges from the models and definitions. That is, learning is context dependent and students with poor conceptual understanding typically have locally connected knowledge structures with isolated conceptual constructs that are unable to establish similarities and contrasts between contexts.

Additionally, this idea of fragmentation is demonstrated through many studies on student problem solving in physics and other fields. It has been shown that a student’s knowledge organization is a key aspect for distinguishing experts from novices (Bagno, Eylon, & Ganiel, 2000 ; Chi, Feltovich, & Glaser, 1981 ; De Jong & Ferguson-Hesler, 1986 ; Eylon & Reif, 1984 ; Ferguson-Hesler & De Jong, 1990 ; Heller & Reif, 1984 ; Larkin, McDermott, Simon, & Simon, 1980 ; Smith, 1992 ; Veldhuis, 1990 ; Wexler, 1982 ). Expert’s knowledge is organized around core principles of physics, which are applied to guide problem solving and develop connections between different domains as well as new, unfamiliar situations (Brown, 1989 ; Perkins & Salomon, 1989 ; Salomon & Perkins, 1989 ). Novices, on the other hand, lack a well-organized knowledge structure and often solve problems by relying on surface features that are directly mapped to certain problem-solving outcomes through memorization (Chi, Bassok, Lewis, Reimann, & Glaser, 1989 ; Hardiman, Dufresne, & Mestre, 1989 ; Schoenfeld & Herrmann, 1982 ).

This lack of organization creates many difficulties in the comprehension of basic concepts and in solving complex problems. This leads to the common complaint that students’ knowledge of physics is reduced to formulas and vague labels of the concepts, which are unable to substantively contribute to meaningful reasoning processes. A novice’s fragmented knowledge structure severely limits the learner’s conceptual understanding. In essence, these students are able to memorize how to approach a problem given specific information but lack the understanding of the underlying concept of the approach, limiting their ability to apply this approach to a novel situation. In order to achieve expert-like understanding, a student’s knowledge structure must integrate all of the fragmented ideas around the core principle to form a coherent and fully connected conceptual framework.

Towards a more general theoretical consideration, students’ alternative conceptions and fragmentation in knowledge structures can be viewed through both the “naïve theory” framework (e.g., Posner, Strike, Hewson, & Gertzog, 1982 ; Vosniadou, Vamvakoussi, & Skopeliti, 2008 ) and the “knowledge in pieces” (DiSessa, 1993 ) perspective. The “naïve theory” framework considers students entering the classroom with stable and coherent ideas (naïve theories) about the natural world that differ from those presented by experts. In the “knowledge in pieces” perspective, student knowledge is constructed in real-time and incorporates context features with the p-prims to form the observed conceptual expressions. Although there exists an ongoing debate between these two views (Kalman & Lattery, 2018 ), it is more productive to focus on their instructional implications for promoting meaningful conceptual change in students’ knowledge structures.

In the process of learning, students may enter the classroom with a range of initial states depending on the population and content. For topics with well-established empirical experiences, students often have developed their own ideas and understanding, while on topics without prior exposure, students may create their initial understanding in real-time based on related prior knowledge and given contextual features (Bao & Redish, 2006 ). These initial states of understanding, regardless of their origin, are usually different from those of experts. Therefore, the main function of teaching and learning is to guide students to modify their initial understanding towards the experts’ views. Although students’ initial understanding may exist as a body of coherent ideas within limited contexts, as students start to change their knowledge structures throughout the learning process, they may evolve into a wide range of transitional states with varying levels of knowledge integration and coherence. The discussion in this brief review on students’ knowledge structures regarding fragmentation and integration are primarily focused on the transitional stages emerged through learning.

The corresponding instructional goal is then to help students more effectively develop an integrated knowledge structure so as to achieve a deep conceptual understanding. From an educator’s perspective, Bloom’s taxonomy of education objectives establishes a hierarchy of six levels of cognitive skills based on their specificity and complexity: Remember (lowest and most specific), Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, and Create (highest and most general and complex) (Anderson et al., 2001 ; Bloom, Engelhart, Furst, Hill, & Krathwohl, 1956 ). This hierarchy of skills exemplifies the transition of a learner’s cognitive development from a fragmented and contextually situated knowledge structure (novice with low level cognitive skills) to a well-integrated and globally networked expert-like structure (with high level cognitive skills).

As a student’s learning progresses from lower to higher cognitive levels, the student’s knowledge structure becomes more integrated and is easier to transfer across contexts (less context specific). For example, beginning stage students may only be able to memorize and perform limited applications of the features of certain contexts and their conditional variations, with which the students were specifically taught. This leads to the establishment of a locally connected knowledge construct. When a student’s learning progresses from the level of Remember to Understand, the student begins to develop connections among some of the fragmented pieces to form a more fully connected network linking a larger set of contexts, thus advancing into a higher level of understanding. These connections and the ability to transfer between different situations form the basis of deep conceptual understanding. This growth of connections leads to a more complete and integrated cognitive structure, which can be mapped to a higher level on Bloom’s taxonomy. This occurs when students are able to relate a larger number of different contextual and conditional aspects of a concept for analyzing and evaluating to a wider variety of problem situations.

Promoting the growth of connections would appear to aid in student learning. Exactly which teaching methods best facilitate this are dependent on the concepts and skills being learned and should be determined through research. However, it has been well recognized that traditional instruction often fails to help students obtain expert-like conceptual understanding, with many misconceptions still existing after instruction, indicating weak integration within a student’s knowledge structure (McKeachie, 1986 ).

Recognizing the failures of traditional teaching, various research-informed teaching methods have been developed to enhance student conceptual learning along with diagnostic tests, which aim to measure the existence of misconceptions. Most advances in teaching methods focus on the inclusion of inquiry-based interactive-engagement elements in lecture, recitations, and labs. In physics education, these methods were popularized after Hake’s landmark study demonstrated the effectiveness of interactive-engagement over traditional lectures (Hake, 1998 ). Some of these methods include the use of peer instruction (Mazur, 1997 ), personal response systems (e.g., Reay, Bao, Li, Warnakulasooriya, & Baugh, 2005 ), studio-style instruction (Beichner et al., 2007 ), and inquiry-based learning (Etkina & Van Heuvelen, 2001 ; Laws, 2004 ; McDermott, 1996 ; Thornton & Sokoloff, 1998 ). The key approach of these methods aims to improve student learning by carefully targeting deficits in student knowledge and actively encouraging students to explore and discuss. Rather than rote memorization, these approaches help promote generalization and deeper conceptual understanding by building connections between knowledge elements.

Based on the literature, including Bloom’s taxonomy and the new education standards that emphasize twenty-first Century skills, a common focus on teaching and learning can be identified. This focus emphasizes helping students develop connections among fragmented segments of their knowledge pieces and is aligned with the knowledge integration perspective, which focuses on helping students develop and refine their knowledge structure toward a more coherently organized and extensively connected network of ideas (Lee, Liu, & Linn, 2011 ; Linn, 2005 ; Nordine, Krajcik, & Fortus, 2011 ; Shen, Liu, & Chang, 2017 ). For meaningful learning to occur, new concepts must be integrated into a learner’s existing knowledge structure by linking the new knowledge to already understood concepts.

Forming an integrated knowledge structure is therefore essential to achieving deep learning, not only in physics but also in all STEM fields. However, defining what connections must occur at different stages of learning, as well as understanding the instructional methods necessary for effectively developing such connections within each STEM disciplinary context, are necessary for current and future research. Together these will provide the much needed foundational knowledge base to guide the development of the next generation of curriculum and classroom environment designed around twenty-first Century learning.

Developing scientific reasoning with inquiry labs

Scientific reasoning is part of the widely emphasized cognitive strand of twenty-first Century skills. Through development of scientific reasoning skills, students’ critical thinking, open-ended problem-solving abilities, and decision-making skills can be improved. In this way, targeting scientific reasoning as a curricular objective is aligned with the goals emphasized in twenty-first Century education. Also, there is a growing body of research on the importance of student development of scientific reasoning, which have been found to positively correlate with course achievement (Cavallo, Rozman, Blickenstaff, & Walker, 2003 ; Johnson & Lawson, 1998 ), improvement on concept tests (Coletta & Phillips, 2005 ; She & Liao, 2010 ), engagement in higher levels of problem solving (Cracolice, Deming, & Ehlert, 2008 ; Fabby & Koenig, 2013 ); and success on transfer (Ates & Cataloglu, 2007 ; Jensen & Lawson, 2011 ).

Unfortunately, research has shown that college students are lacking in scientific reasoning. Lawson ( 1992 ) found that ~ 50% of intro biology students are not capable of applying scientific reasoning in learning, including the ability to develop hypotheses, control variables, and design experiments; all necessary for meaningful scientific inquiry. Research has also found that traditional courses do not significantly develop these abilities, with pre-to-post-test gains of 1%–2%, while inquiry-based courses have gains around 7% (Koenig, Schen, & Bao, 2012 ; Koenig, Schen, Edwards, & Bao, 2012 ). Others found that undergraduates have difficulty developing evidence-based decisions and differentiating between and linking evidence with claims (Kuhn, 1992 ; Shaw, 1996 ; Zeineddin & Abd-El-Khalick, 2010 ). A large scale international study suggested that learning of physics content knowledge with traditional teaching practices does not improve students’ scientific reasoning skills (Bao et al., 2009 ).

Aligned to twenty-first Century learning, it is important to implement curriculum that is specifically designed for developing scientific reasoning abilities within current education settings. Although traditional lectures may continue for decades due to infrastructure constraints, a unique opportunity can be found in the lab curriculum, which may be more readily transformed to include hands-on minds-on group learning activities that are ideal for developing students’ abilities in scientific inquiry and reasoning.

For well over a century, the laboratory has held a distinctive role in student learning (Meltzer & Otero, 2015 ). However, many existing labs, which haven’t changed much since the late 1980s, have received criticism for their outdated cookbook style that lacks effectiveness in developing high-end skills. In addition, labs have been primarily used as a means for verifying the physical principles presented in lecture, and unfortunately, Hofstein and Lunetta ( 1982 ) found in an early review of the literature that research was unable to demonstrate the impact of the lab on student content learning.

About this same time, a shift towards a constructivist view of learning gained popularity and influenced lab curriculum development towards engaging students in the process of constructing knowledge through science inquiry. Curricula, such as Physics by Inquiry (McDermott, 1996 ), Real-Time Physics (Sokoloff, Thornton, & Laws, 2011 ), and Workshop Physics (Laws, 2004 ), were developed with a primary focus on engaging students in cognitive conflict to address misconceptions. Although these approaches have been shown to be highly successful in improving deep learning of physics concepts (McDermott & Redish, 1999 ), the emphasis on conceptual learning does not sufficiently impact the domain general scientific reasoning skills necessitated in the goals of twenty-first Century learning.

Reform in science education, both in terms of targeted content and skills, along with the emergence of knowledge regarding human cognition and learning (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000 ), have generated renewed interest in the potential of inquiry-based lab settings for skill development. In these types of hands-on minds-on learning, students apply the methods and procedures of science inquiry to investigate phenomena and construct scientific claims, solve problems, and communicate outcomes, which holds promise for developing both conceptual understanding and scientific reasoning skills in parallel (Trowbridge, Bybee, & Powell, 2000 ). In addition, the availability of technology to enhance inquiry-based learning has seen exponential growth, along with the emergence of more appropriate research methodologies to support research on student learning.

Although inquiry-based labs hold promise for developing students’ high-end reasoning, analytic, and scientific inquiry abilities, these educational endeavors have not become widespread, with many existing physics laboratory courses still viewed merely as a place to illustrate the physical principles from the lecture course (Meltzer & Otero, 2015 ). Developing scientific ideas from practical experiences, however, is a complex process. Students need sufficient time and opportunity for interaction and reflection on complex, investigative tasks. Blended learning, which merges lecture and lab (such as studio style courses), addresses this issue to some extent, but has experienced limited adoption, likely due to the demanding infrastructure resources, including dedicated technology-intensive classroom space, equipment and maintenance costs, and fully committed trained staff.

Therefore, there is an immediate need to transform the existing standalone lab courses, within the constraints of the existing education infrastructure, into more inquiry-based designs, with one of its primary goals dedicated to developing scientific reasoning skills. These labs should center on constructing knowledge, along with hands-on minds-on practical skills and scientific reasoning, to support modeling a problem, designing and implementing experiments, analyzing and interpreting data, drawing and evaluating conclusions, and effective communication. In particular, training on scientific reasoning needs to be explicitly addressed in the lab curriculum, which should contain components specifically targeting a set of operationally-defined scientific reasoning skills, such as ability to control variables or engage in multivariate causal reasoning. Although effective inquiry may also implicitly develop some aspects of scientific reasoning skills, such development is far less efficient and varies with context when the primary focus is on conceptual learning.

Several recent efforts to enhance the standalone lab course have shown promise in supporting education goals that better align with twenty-first Century learning. For example, the Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) labs involve a series of tasks designed to help students develop the “habits of mind” of scientists and engineers (Etkina et al., 2006 ). The curriculum targets reasoning as well as the lab learning outcomes published by the American Association of Physics Teachers (Kozminski et al., 2014 ). Operationally, ISLE methods focus on scaffolding students’ developing conceptual understanding using inquiry learning without a heavy emphasis on cognitive conflict, making it more appropriate and effective for entry level students and K-12 teachers.

Likewise, Koenig, Wood, Bortner, and Bao ( 2019 ) have developed a lab curriculum that is intentionally designed around the twenty-first Century learning goals for developing cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal abilities. In terms of the cognitive domain, the lab learning outcomes center on critical thinking and scientific reasoning but do so through operationally defined sub-skills, all of which are transferrable across STEM. These selected sub-skills are found in the research literature, and include the ability to control variables and engage in data analytics and causal reasoning. For each targeted sub-skill, a series of pre-lab and in-class activities provide students with repeated, deliberate practice within multiple hypothetical science-based scenarios followed by real inquiry-based lab contexts. This explicit instructional strategy has been shown to be essential for the development of scientific reasoning (Chen & Klahr, 1999 ). In addition, the Karplus Learning Cycle (Karplus, 1964 ) provides the foundation for the structure of the lab activities and involves cycles of exploration, concept introduction, and concept application. The curricular framework is such that as the course progresses, the students engage in increasingly complex tasks, which allow students the opportunity to learn gradually through a progression from simple to complex skills.

As part of this same curriculum, students’ interpersonal skills are developed, in part, through teamwork, as students work in groups of 3 or 4 to address open-ended research questions, such as, What impacts the period of a pendulum? In addition, due to time constraints, students learn early on about the importance of working together in an efficient manor towards a common goal, with one set of written lab records per team submitted after each lab. Checkpoints built into all in-class activities involve Socratic dialogue between the instructor and students and promote oral communication. This use of directed questioning guides students in articulating their reasoning behind decisions and claims made, while supporting the development of scientific reasoning and conceptual understanding in parallel (Hake, 1992 ). Students’ intrapersonal skills, as well as communication skills, are promoted through the submission of individual lab reports. These reports require students to reflect upon their learning over each of four multi-week experiments and synthesize their ideas into evidence-based arguments, which support a claim. Due to the length of several weeks over which students collect data for each of these reports, the ability to organize the data and manage their time becomes essential.

Despite the growing emphasis on research and development of curriculum that targets twenty-first Century learning, converting a traditionally taught lab course into a meaningful inquiry-based learning environment is challenging in current reform efforts. Typically, the biggest challenge is a lack of resources; including faculty time to create or adapt inquiry-based materials for the local setting, training faculty and graduate student instructors who are likely unfamiliar with this approach, and the potential cost of new equipment. Koenig et al. ( 2019 ) addressed these potential implementation barriers by designing curriculum with these challenges in mind. That is, the curriculum was designed as a flexible set of modules that target specific sub-skills, with each module consisting of pre-lab (hypothetical) and in-lab (real) activities. Each module was designed around a curricular framework such that an adopting institution can use the materials as written, or can incorporate their existing equipment and experiments into the framework with minimal effort. Other non-traditional approaches have also been experimented with, such as the work by Sobhanzadeh, Kalman, and Thompson ( 2017 ), which targets typical misconceptions by using conceptual questions to engage students in making a prediction, designing and conducting a related experiment, and determining whether or not the results support the hypothesis.

Another challenge for inquiry labs is the assessment of skills-based learning outcomes. For assessment of scientific reasoning, a new instrument on inquiry in scientific thinking analytics and reasoning (iSTAR) has been developed, which can be easily implemented across large numbers of students as both a pre- and post-test to assess gains. iSTAR assesses reasoning skills necessary in the systematical conduct of scientific inquiry, which includes the ability to explore a problem, formulate and test hypotheses, manipulate and isolate variables, and observe and evaluate the consequences (see www.istarassessment.org ). The new instrument expands upon the commonly used classroom test of scientific reasoning (Lawson, 1978 , 2000 ), which has been identified with a number of validity weaknesses and a ceiling effect for college students (Bao, Xiao, Koenig, & Han, 2018 ).

Many education innovations need supporting infrastructures that can ensure adoption and lasting impact. However, making large-scale changes to current education settings can be risky, if not impossible. New education approaches, therefore, need to be designed to adapt to current environmental constraints. Since higher-end skills are a primary focus of twenty-first Century learning, which are most effectively developed in inquiry-based group settings, transforming current lecture and lab courses into this new format is critical. Although this transformation presents great challenges, promising solutions have already emerged from various research efforts. Perhaps the biggest challenge is for STEM educators and researchers to form an alliance to work together to re-engineer many details of the current education infrastructure in order to overcome the multitude of implementation obstacles.

This paper attempts to identify a few central ideas to provide a broad picture for future research and development in physics education, or STEM education in general, to promote twenty-first Century learning. Through a synthesis of the existing literature within the authors’ limited scope, a number of views surface.

Education is a service to prepare (not to select) the future workforce and should be designed as learner-centered, with the education goals and teaching-learning methods tailored to the needs and characteristics of the learners themselves. Given space constraints, the reader is referred to the meta-analysis conducted by Freeman et al. ( 2014 ), which provides strong support for learner-centered instruction. The changing world of the twenty-first Century informs the establishment of new education goals, which should be used to guide research and development of teaching and learning for present day students. Aligned to twenty-first Century learning, the new science standards have set the goals for STEM education to transition towards promoting deep learning of disciplinary knowledge, thereby building upon decades of research in PER, while fostering a wide range of general high-end cognitive and non-cognitive abilities that are transferable across all disciplines.

Following these education goals, more research is needed to operationally define and assess the desired high-end reasoning abilities. Building on a clear definition with effective assessments, a large number of empirical studies are needed to investigate how high-end abilities can be developed in parallel with deep learning of concepts, such that what is learned can be generalized to impact the development of curriculum and teaching methods which promote skills-based learning across all STEM fields. Specifically for PER, future research should emphasize knowledge integration to promote deep conceptual understanding in physics along with inquiry learning to foster scientific reasoning. Integration of physics learning in contexts that connect to other STEM disciplines is also an area for more research. Cross-cutting, interdisciplinary connections are becoming important features of the future generation physics curriculum and defines how physics should be taught collaboratively with other STEM courses.

This paper proposed meaningful areas for future research that are aligned with clearly defined education goals for twenty-first Century learning. Based on the existing literature, a number of challenges are noted for future directions of research, including the need for:

clear and operational definitions of goals to guide research and practice

concrete operational definitions of high-end abilities for which students are expected to develop

effective assessment methods and instruments to measure high-end abilities and other components of twenty-first Century learning

a knowledge base of the curriculum and teaching and learning environments that effectively support the development of advanced skills

integration of knowledge and ability development regarding within-discipline and cross-discipline learning in STEM

effective means to disseminate successful education practices

The list is by no means exhaustive, but these themes emerge above others. In addition, the high-end abilities discussed in this paper focus primarily on scientific reasoning, which is highly connected to other skills, such as critical thinking, systems thinking, multivariable modeling, computational thinking, design thinking, etc. These abilities are expected to develop in STEM learning, although some may be emphasized more within certain disciplines than others. Due to the limited scope of this paper, not all of these abilities were discussed in detail but should be considered an integral part of STEM learning.

Finally, a metacognitive position on education research is worth reflection. One important understanding is that the fundamental learning mechanism hasn’t changed, although the context in which learning occurs has evolved rapidly as a manifestation of the fast-forwarding technology world. Since learning is a process at the interface between a learner’s mind and the environment, the main focus of educators should always be on the learner’s interaction with the environment, not just the environment. In recent education developments, many new learning platforms have emerged at an exponential rate, such as the massive open online courses (MOOCs), STEM creative labs, and other online learning resources, to name a few. As attractive as these may be, it is risky to indiscriminately follow trends in education technology and commercially-incentivized initiatives before such interventions are shown to be effective by research. Trends come and go but educators foster students who have only a limited time to experience education. Therefore, delivering effective education is a high-stakes task and needs to be carefully and ethically planned and implemented. When game-changing opportunities emerge, one needs to not only consider the winners (and what they can win), but also the impact on all that is involved.

Based on a century of education research, consensus has settled on a fundamental mechanism of teaching and learning, which suggests that knowledge is developed within a learner through constructive processes and that team-based guided scientific inquiry is an effective method for promoting deep learning of content knowledge as well as developing high-end cognitive abilities, such as scientific reasoning. Emerging technology and methods should serve to facilitate (not to replace) such learning by providing more effective education settings and conveniently accessible resources. This is an important relationship that should survive many generations of technological and societal changes in the future to come. From a physicist’s point of view, a fundamental relation like this can be considered the “mechanics” of teaching and learning. Therefore, educators and researchers should hold on to these few fundamental principles without being distracted by the surfacing ripples of the world’s motion forward.

Availability of data and materials

Not applicable.

Abbreviations

American Association of Physics Teachers

Investigative Science Learning Environment

Inquiry in Scientific Thinking Analytics and Reasoning

Massive open online course

New Generation Science Standards

• Physics education research

Science Technology Engineering and Math

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The research is supported in part by NSF Awards DUE-1431908 and DUE-1712238. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

The research is supported in part by NSF Awards DUE-1431908 and DUE-1712238.

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Science, technology and innovation in a 21st century context

• Published: 27 August 2011
• Volume 44 , pages 209–213, ( 2011 )

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This editorial essay was prepared by John H. “Jack” Marburger for a workshop on the “science of science and innovation policy” held in 2009 that was the basis for this special issue. It is published posthumously .

Linking the words “science,” “technology,” and “innovation,” may suggest that we know more about how these activities are related than we really do. This very common linkage implicitly conveys a linear progression from scientific research to technology creation to innovative products. More nuanced pictures of these complex activities break them down into components that interact with each other in a multi-dimensional socio-technological-economic network. A few examples will help to make this clear.

Science has always functioned on two levels that we may describe as curiosity-driven and need-driven, and they interact in sometimes surprising ways. Galileo’s telescope, the paradigmatic instrument of discovery in pure science, emerged from an entirely pragmatic tradition of lens-making for eye-glasses. And we should keep in mind that the industrial revolution gave more to science than it received, at least until the last half of the nineteenth century when the sciences of chemistry and electricity began to produce serious economic payoffs. The flowering of science during the era, we call the enlightenment owed much to its links with crafts and industry, but as it gained momentum science created its own need for practical improvements. After all, the frontiers of science are defined by the capabilities of instrumentation, that is, of technology. The needs of pure science are a huge but poorly understood stimulus for technologies that have the capacity to be disruptive precisely because these needs do not arise from the marketplace. The innovators who built the World Wide Web on the foundation of the Internet were particle physicists at CERN, struggling to satisfy their unique need to share complex information. Others soon discovered “needs” of which they had been unaware that could be satisfied by this innovation, and from that point the Web transformed the Internet from a tool for the technological elite into a broad platform for a new kind of economy.

Necessity is said to be the mother of invention, but in all human societies, “necessity” is a mix of culturally conditioned perceptions and the actual physical necessities of life. The concept of need, of what is wanted, is the ultimate driver of markets and an essential dimension of innovation. And as the example of the World Wide Web shows, need is very difficult to identify before it reveals itself in a mass movement. Why did I not know I needed a cell phone before nearly everyone else had one? Because until many others had one I did not, in fact, need one. Innovation has this chicken-and-egg quality that makes it extremely hard to analyze. We all know of visionaries who conceive of a society totally transformed by their invention and who are bitter that the world has not embraced their idea. Sometimes we think of them as crackpots, or simply unrealistic about what it takes to change the world. We practical people necessarily view the world through the filter of what exists, and fail to anticipate disruptive change. Nearly always we are surprised by the rapid acceptance of a transformative idea. If we truly want to encourage innovation through government policies, we are going to have to come to grips with this deep unpredictability of the mass acceptance of a new concept. Works analyzing this phenomenon are widely popular under titles like “ The Tipping Point ” by Gladwell ( 2000 ) or more recently the book by Taleb ( 2007 ) called The Black Swan , among others.

What causes innovations to be adopted and integrated into economies depends on their ability to satisfy some perceived need by consumers, and that perception may be an artifact of marketing, or fashion, or cultural inertia, or ignorance. Some of the largest and most profitable industries in the developed world—entertainment, automobiles, clothing and fashion accessories, health products, children’s toys, grownups’ toys!—depend on perceptions of need that go far beyond the utilitarian and are notoriously difficult to predict. And yet these industries clearly depend on sophisticated and rapidly advancing technologies to compete in the marketplace. Of course, they do not depend only upon technology. Technologies are part of the environment for innovation, or in a popular and very appropriate metaphor—part of the innovation ecology .

This complexity of innovation and its ecology is conveyed in Chapter One of a currently popular best-seller in the United States called Innovation Nation by the American innovation guru, Kao ( 2007 ), formerly on the faculty of the Harvard Business School:

“I define it [innovation],” writes Kao, “as the ability of individuals, companies, and entire nations to continuously create their desired future. Innovation depends on harvesting knowledge from a range of disciplines besides science and technology, among them design, social science, and the arts. And it is exemplified by more than just products; services, experiences, and processes can be innovative as well. The work of entrepreneurs, scientists, and software geeks alike contributes to innovation. It is also about the middlemen who know how to realize value from ideas. Innovation flows from shifts in mind-set that can generate new business models, recognize new opportunities, and weave innovations throughout the fabric of society. It is about new ways of doing and seeing things as much as it is about the breakthrough idea.” (Kao 2007 , p. 19).

This is not your standard government-type definition. Gurus, of course, do not have to worry about leading indicators and predictive measures of policy success. Nevertheless, some policy guidance can be drawn from this high level “definition,” and I will do so later.

The first point, then, is that the structural aspects of “science, technology, and innovation” are imperfectly defined, complex, and poorly understood. There is still much work to do to identify measures, develop models, and test them against actual experience before we can say we really know what it takes to foster innovation. The second point I want to make is about the temporal aspects: all three of these complex activities are changing with time. Science, of course, always changes through the accumulation of knowledge, but it also changes through revolutions in its theoretical structure, through its ever-improving technology, and through its evolving sociology. The technology and sociology of science are currently impacted by a rapidly changing information technology. Technology today flows increasingly from research laboratories but the influence of technology on both science and innovation depends strongly on its commercial adoption, that is, on market forces. Commercial scale manufacturing drives down the costs of technology so it can be exploited in an ever-broadening range of applications. The mass market for precision electro-mechanical devices like cameras, printers, and disk drives is the basis for new scientific instrumentation and also for further generations of products that integrate hundreds of existing components in new devices and business models like the Apple iPod and video games, not to mention improvements in old products like cars and telephones. Innovation is changing too as it expands its scope beyond individual products to include all or parts of systems such as supply chains and inventory control, as in the Wal-Mart phenomenon. Apple’s iPod does not stand alone; it is integrated with iTunes software and novel arrangements with media providers.

With one exception, however, technology changes more slowly than it appears because we encounter basic technology platforms in a wide variety of relatively short-lived products. Technology is like a language that innovators use to express concepts in the form of products, and business models that serve (and sometimes create) a variety of needs, some of which fluctuate with fashion. The exception to the illusion of rapid technology change is the pace of information technology, which is no illusion. It has fulfilled Moore’s Law for more than half a century, and it is a remarkable historical anomaly arising from the systematic exploitation of the understanding of the behavior of microscopic matter following the discovery of quantum mechanics. The pace would be much less without a continually evolving market for the succession of smaller, higher capacity products. It is not at all clear that the market demand will continue to support the increasingly expensive investment in fabrication equipment for each new step up the exponential curve of Moore’s Law. The science is probably available to allow many more capacity doublings if markets can sustain them. Let me digress briefly on this point.

Many science commentators have described the twentieth century as the century of physics and the twenty-first as the century of biology. We now know that is misleading. It is true that our struggle to understand the ultimate constituents of matter has now encompassed (apparently) everything of human scale and relevance, and that the universe of biological phenomena now lies open for systematic investigation and dramatic applications in health, agriculture, and energy production. But there are two additional frontiers of physical science, one already highly productive, the other very intriguing. The first is the frontier of complexity , where physics, chemistry, materials science, biology, and mathematics all come together. This is where nanotechnology and biotechnology reside. These are huge fields that form the core of basic science policy in most developed nations. The basic science of the twenty-first century is neither biology nor physics, but an interdisciplinary mix of these and other traditional fields. Continued development of this domain contributes to information technology and much else. I mentioned two frontiers. The other physical science frontier borders the nearly unexploited domain of quantum coherence phenomena . It is a very large domain and potentially a source of entirely new platform technologies not unlike microelectronics. To say more about this would take me too far from our topic. The point is that nature has many undeveloped physical phenomena to enrich the ecology of innovation and keep us marching along the curve of Moore’s Law if we can afford to do so.

I worry about the psychological impact of the rapid advance of information technology. I believe it has created unrealistic expectations about all technologies and has encouraged a casual attitude among policy makers toward the capability of science and technology to deliver solutions to difficult social problems. This is certainly true of what may be the greatest technical challenge of all time—the delivery of energy to large developed and developing populations without adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. The challenge of sustainable energy technology is much more difficult than many people currently seem to appreciate. I am afraid that time will make this clear.

Structural complexities and the intrinsic dynamism of science and technology pose challenges to policy makers, but they seem almost manageable compared with the challenges posed by extrinsic forces. Among these are globalization and the impact of global economic development on the environment. The latter, expressed quite generally through the concept of “sustainability” is likely to be a component of much twenty-first century innovation policy. Measures of development, competitiveness, and innovation need to include sustainability dimensions to be realistic over the long run. Development policies that destroy economically important environmental systems, contribute to harmful global change, and undermine the natural resource basis of the economy are bad policies. Sustainability is now an international issue because the scale of development and the globalization of economies have environmental and natural resource implications that transcend national borders.

From the policy point of view, globalization is a not a new phenomenon. Science has been globalized for centuries, and we ought to be studying it more closely as a model for effective responses to the globalization of our economies. What is striking about science is the strong imperative to share ideas through every conceivable channel to the widest possible audience. If you had to name one chief characteristic of science, it would be empiricism. If you had to name two, the other would be open communication of data and ideas. The power of open communication in science cannot be overestimated. It has established, uniquely among human endeavors, an absolute global standard. And it effectively recruits talent from every part of the globe to labor at the science frontiers. The result has been an extraordinary legacy of understanding of the phenomena that shape our existence. Science is the ultimate example of an open innovation system.

Science practice has received much attention from philosophers, social scientists, and historians during the past half-century, and some of what has been learned holds valuable lessons for policy makers. It is fascinating to me how quickly countries that provide avenues to advanced education are able to participate in world science. The barriers to a small but productive scientific activity appear to be quite low and whether or not a country participates in science appears to be discretionary. A small scientific establishment, however, will not have significant direct economic impact. Its value at early stages of development is indirect, bringing higher performance standards, international recognition, and peer role models for a wider population. A science program of any size is also a link to the rich intellectual resources of the world scientific community. The indirect benefit of scientific research to a developing country far exceeds its direct benefit, and policy needs to recognize this. It is counterproductive to base support for science in such countries on a hoped-for direct economic stimulus.

Keeping in mind that the innovation ecology includes far more than science and technology, it should be obvious that within a small national economy innovation can thrive on a very small indigenous science and technology base. But innovators, like scientists, do require access to technical information and ideas. Consequently, policies favorable to innovation will create access to education and encourage free communication with the world technical community. Anything that encourages awareness of the marketplace and all its actors on every scale will encourage innovation.

This brings me back to John Kao’s definition of innovation. His vision of “the ability of individuals, companies, and entire nations to continuously create their desired future” implies conditions that create that ability, including most importantly educational opportunity (Kao 2007 , p. 19). The notion that “innovation depends on harvesting knowledge from a range of disciplines besides science and technology” implies that innovators must know enough to recognize useful knowledge when they see it, and that they have access to knowledge sources across a spectrum that ranges from news media and the Internet to technical and trade conferences (2007, p. 19). If innovation truly “flows from shifts in mind-set that can generate new business models, recognize new opportunities, and weave innovations throughout the fabric of society,” then the fabric of society must be somewhat loose-knit to accommodate the new ideas (2007, p. 19). Innovation is about risk and change, and deep forces in every society resist both of these. A striking feature of the US innovation ecology is the positive attitude toward failure, an attitude that encourages risk-taking and entrepreneurship.

All this gives us some insight into what policies we need to encourage innovation. Innovation policy is broader than science and technology policy, but the latter must be consistent with the former to produce a healthy innovation ecology. Innovation requires a predictable social structure, an open marketplace, and a business culture amenable to risk and change. It certainly requires an educational infrastructure that produces people with a global awareness and sufficient technical literacy to harvest the fruits of current technology. What innovation does not require is the creation by governments of a system that defines, regulates, or even rewards innovation except through the marketplace or in response to evident success. Some regulation of new products and new ideas is required to protect public health and environmental quality, but innovation needs lots of freedom. Innovative ideas that do not work out should be allowed to die so the innovation community can learn from the experience and replace the failed attempt with something better.

Do we understand innovation well enough to develop policy for it? If the policy addresses very general infrastructure issues such as education, economic, and political stability and the like, the answer is perhaps. If we want to measure the impact of specific programs on innovation, the answer is no. Studies of innovation are at an early stage where anecdotal information and case studies, similar to John Kao’s book—or the books on Business Week’s top ten list of innovation titles—are probably the most useful tools for policy makers.

I have been urging increased attention to what I call the science of science policy —the systematic quantitative study of the subset of our economy called science and technology—including the construction and validation of micro- and macro-economic models for S&T activity. Innovators themselves, and those who finance them, need to identify their needs and the impediments they face. Eventually, we may learn enough to create reliable indicators by which we can judge the health of our innovation ecosystems. The goal is well worth the sustained effort that will be required to achieve it.

Gladwell, M. (2000). The tipping point: How little things can make a big difference . Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

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Kao, J. (2007). Innovation nation: How America is losing its innovation edge, why it matters, and what we can do to get it back . New York: Free Press.

Taleb, N. N. (2007). The black swan: The impact of the highly improbable . New York: Random House.

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Marburger, J.H. Science, technology and innovation in a 21st century context. Policy Sci 44 , 209–213 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-011-9137-3

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Contemporary Issues and the 21st Century Child New Perspectives on Childhood

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This book is essential reading for any Early Years or Early Childhood Studies student. Bringing you up-to-date with latest developments and key issues, this book helps you to understand the child in relation to society. The book is divided into three parts which focus on the influence on childhood, children’s experiences and  children’s mind, with topics including:

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Climate change could become the main driver of biodiversity decline by mid-century

Global biodiversity has declined between 2% and 11% during the 20th century due to land-use change alone, according to a large multi-model study published in Science . Projections show climate change could become the main driver of biodiversity decline by the mid-21st century.

The analysis was led by the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and is the largest modelling study of its kind to date. The researchers compared thirteen models for assessing the impact of land-use change and climate change on four distinct biodiversity metrics, as well as on nine ecosystem services.

GLOBAL BIODIVERSITY MAY HAVE DECLINED BY 2% TO 11% DUE TO LAND-USE CHANGE ALONE

Land-use change is considered the largest driver of biodiversity change, according to the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). However, scientists are divided over how much biodiversity has changed in past decades. To better answer this question, the researchers modelled the impacts of land-use change on biodiversity over the 20th century. They found global biodiversity may have declined by 2% to 11% due to land-use change alone. This span covers a range of four biodiversity metrics 1 calculated by seven different models.

"By including all world regions in our model, we were able to fill many blind spots and address criticism of other approaches working with fragmented and potentially biased data," says first author Prof Henrique Pereira, research group head at iDiv and MLU. "Every approach has its ups and downsides. We believe our modelling approach provides the most comprehensive estimate of biodiversity trends worldwide."

MIXED TRENDS FOR ECOSYSTEM SERVICES

Using another set of five models, the researchers also calculated the simultaneous impact of land-use change on so-called ecosystem services, i.e., the benefits nature provides to humans. In the past century, they found a massive increase in provisioning ecosystem services, like food and timber production. By contrast, regulating ecosystem services, like pollination, nitrogen retention, or carbon sequestration, moderately declined.

CLIMATE AND LAND-USE CHANGE COMBINED MIGHT LEAD TO BIODIVERSITY LOSS IN ALL WORLD REGIONS

The researchers also examined how biodiversity and ecosystem services might evolve in the future. For these projections, they added climate change as a growing driver of biodiversity change to their calculations.

Climate change stands to put additional strain on biodiversity and ecosystem services, according to the findings. While land-use change remains relevant, climate change could become the most important driver of biodiversity loss by mid-century. The researchers assessed three widely-used scenarios -- from a sustainable development to a high emissions scenario. For all scenarios, the impacts of land-use change and climate change combined result in biodiversity loss in all world regions.

While the overall downward trend is consistent, there are considerable variations across world regions, models, and scenarios.

PROJECTIONS ARE NOT PREDICTIONS

"The purpose of long-term scenarios is not to predict what will happen," says co-author Dr Inês Martins from the University of York. "Rather, it is to understand alternatives, and therefore avoid these trajectories, which might be least desirable, and select those that have positive outcomes. Trajectories depend on the policies we choose, and these decisions are made day by day." Martins co-led the model analyses and is an alumna of iDiv and MLU.

The authors also note that even the most sustainable scenario assessed does not deploy all the policies that could be put in place to protect biodiversity in the coming decades. For instance, bioenergy deployment, one key component of the sustainability scenario, can contribute to mitigating climate change, but can simultaneously reduce species habitats. In contrast, measures to increase the effectiveness and coverage of protected areas or large-scale rewilding were not explored in any of the scenarios

MODELS HELP IDENTIFY EFFECTIVE POLICIES

Assessing the impacts of concrete policies on biodiversity helps identify those policies most effective for safeguarding and promoting biodiversity and ecosystem services, according to the researchers. "There are modelling uncertainties, for sure," Pereira adds. "Still, our findings clearly show that current policies are insufficient to meet international biodiversity goals. We need renewed efforts to make progress against one of the world's largest problems, which is human-caused biodiversity change."

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• Henrique M. Pereira, Inês S. Martins, Isabel M. D. Rosa, HyeJin Kim, Paul Leadley, Alexander Popp, Detlef P. van Vuuren, George Hurtt, Luise Quoss, Almut Arneth, Daniele Baisero, Michel Bakkenes, Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer, Louise Chini, Moreno Di Marco, Simon Ferrier, Shinichiro Fujimori, Carlos A. Guerra, Michael Harfoot, Thomas D. Harwood, Tomoko Hasegawa, Vanessa Haverd, Petr Havlík, Stefanie Hellweg, Jelle P. Hilbers, Samantha L. L. Hill, Akiko Hirata, Andrew J. Hoskins, Florian Humpenöder, Jan H. Janse, Walter Jetz, Justin A. Johnson, Andreas Krause, David Leclère, Tetsuya Matsui, Johan R. Meijer, Cory Merow, Michael Obersteiner, Haruka Ohashi, Adriana De Palma, Benjamin Poulter, Andy Purvis, Benjamin Quesada, Carlo Rondinini, Aafke M. Schipper, Josef Settele, Richard Sharp, Elke Stehfest, Bernardo B. N. Strassburg, Kiyoshi Takahashi, Matthew V. Talluto, Wilfried Thuiller, Nicolas Titeux, Piero Visconti, Christopher Ware, Florian Wolf, Rob Alkemade. Global trends and scenarios for terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystem services from 1900 to 2050 . Science , 2024; 384 (6694): 458 DOI: 10.1126/science.adn3441

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Princeton engineering, the science of static shock jolted into the 21st century.

By Scott Lyon

April 9, 2024

Static electricity has puzzled scientists for thousands of years. Above, water ions carry charge between two electrically insulating materials. The blue mesh represents the flow of charge that could be felt as a spark. Image courtesy of the researchers

Shuffling across the carpet to zap a friend may be the oldest trick in the book, but on a deep level that prank still mystifies scientists, even after thousands of years of study.

Now Princeton researchers have sparked new life into static. Using millions of hours of computational time to run detailed simulations, the researchers found a way to describe static charge atom-by-atom with the mathematics of heat and work. Their paper appeared in Nature Communications on March 23.

The study looked specifically at how charge moves between materials that do not allow the free flow of electrons, called insulating materials, such as vinyl and acrylic. The researchers said there is no established view on what mechanisms drive these jolts, despite the ubiquity of static: the crackle and pop of clothes pulled from a dryer, packing peanuts that cling to a box.

“We know it’s not electrons,” said Mike Webb , assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering , who led the study. “What is it?”

Webb first asked himself that question as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. He puzzled over it with colleagues, baffled that such a common phenomenon could be so poorly understood. But the more they looked, the more insurmountable the questions became. “It just seemed out of reach,” he said.

It had been out of reach since Thales of Miletus first rubbed amber with fur and watched the amber (Greek: elektron ) collect feathers and dust — 26 centuries ago. Thales was one of the first people to explain nature through reason rather than supernatural forces. He played a critical role in the development of philosophy and eventually science. Despite the depth and breadth of knowledge accumulated over subsequent millennia, despite the myriad technologies born of that knowledge, science, in all that time, never cracked static. Maybe it never would.

At Princeton Webb got to talking to his colleague Sankaran Sundaresan , a leading expert in chemical reaction engineering who specializes in the flow of materials in gaseous chambers. In those environments, loaded with volatile chemicals, a stray spark could be deadly. Sundaresan had worked with static charge for decades, using reliable experimental data to predict but not fully fathom how charge moved in these systems.

“I treat that like a black box,” said Sundaresan, the Norman John Sollenberger Professor in Engineering. “We do some experiments and the experiments tell me: This is what happens. This is the charge.” He works down to the limit and carefully notes what he sees. What happens inside the black box remains a mystery.

One thing you find no matter where you look, though, according to Sundaresan, is trace amounts of water. Charged water molecules are everywhere, in nearly everything, clinging to virtually every surface on Earth. Even in extremely arid conditions, under intense heat, stray water ions pool into microscopic oases that harbor electrical charge.

Incidentally, Thales is best known not for his work on electricity but for an even grander project. He proposed that the entirety of nature was made of water, that water was the ur-substance, the essential stuff. It was the first attempt at a unified theory of everything. Aristotle wrote it all down.

Over the arc of Sundaresan’s career, he and his colleagues shrunk that black box so that the mysteries have been pushed ever deeper. But mysteries they remain.

The conversation between him and Webb led to a mutual realization: Sundaresan had decades of insight into data from reactors, and Webb could apply sophisticated atom-scale computational techniques to look at these water ions from the perspective of thermodynamics. How much energy would it take for a water ion to bolt from surface to surface? Maybe that would explain what was happening inside Sundaresan’s black box. The unresolved puzzle from Webb’s postdoc days came unlocked.

By modeling the relationship between charged water molecules and the amount of energy those molecules have available to propel them between surfaces, Webb and graduate student Hang Zhang demonstrated a very precise mathematical approximation of how electrical charge moves between two insulating materials.

In other words, they used math to simulate the movement of around 80,000 atoms. Those simulations matched real-life observations with a very high degree of precision. It turns out, in all likelihood, static shock is a function of water, and more specifically, the free energy of stray water ions. With that framework, Webb and Zhang revealed the molecular underpinnings of those familiar shocks in infinitesimal detail. They blew Sundaresan’s black box wide open. If only Thales could see.

The paper “Thermodynamic driving forces in contact electrification between polymeric materials” was published March 23 in the journal Nature Communications. Support for this work was provided by the Princeton Innovation Project X Fund and the U.S. Department of Energy. The simulations and analyses were performed using the resources of Princeton Research Computing.

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• Access to justice

Fresh ideas for 21st century justice

More and more people and small businesses cannot afford legal advice and cannot resolve their legal issues.

This can lead to loss of earnings, poor mental and physical health, unemployment, and homelessness – all of which rob people of their potential, increase pressure on public services and hold back growth.

At the same time, many small and medium-sized law firms are facing new challenges:

• rapid digitalisation and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI)
• cost-of-living crisis
• changing consumer behaviours and expectations

Solicitors play a key role helping people understand and access their rights, and we want to make sure that the profession leads the conversation about how make our justice system fit for the future.

In March 2023, we kicked off a three-year project to develop solutions to some of the problems facing civil justice in England and Wales.

We’re working in collaboration with experts, small business representatives and consumer groups to propose practical changes to make the system work better for those on low incomes and small businesses.

We also work with our advisory group, who are a group of experts providing critical feedback in relation to the project.

List of advisory group members  

Chair: Richard Atkinson, deputy vice president, the Law Society

Membership:

• Shruti Ajitsaria, partner and head of fuse at Allen and Overy
• Lola Bello, Legal Services Consumer Panel
• Edward Bird, founder and managing director, Solomonic
• Dr. Natalie Byrom, UCL Faculty of Laws
• David Cox, legal and compliance director, Rightmove
• Rebecca Hilsenrath, director of external affairs, Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman
• Alexandra Lennox, director of growth and strategic partnerships at Orbital Witness
• Jelena Lentzos, head of strategy and policy, Legal Services Board
• Ashish Patel, programme head, Justice, Nuffield Foundation
• Matthew Pennington, chair, UK Legaltech Association and director, Safe Capital
• Neil Roberts, head of legal services, Which?
• Phil Robertson, director of policy, Bar Council
• Fiona Rutherford, CEO, JUSTICE
• Sir Ernest Ryder, master of Pembroke College, Oxford and former senior president of tribunals and Lord Justice of Appeal
• Kevin Williamson, director, Housing Ombudsman and ombudsman, Financial Ombudsman
• Yasmin Waljee, lead of social impact practice and head of pro bono at Hogan Lovells
• Paul Wilson, policy director, Federation of Small Businesses
• Stuart Whittle, partner and chief Innovation and technology officer at Weightmans, and member of Legal IT Innovation Group Board

The Law Society:

• Lucy Dennett, director of policy
• David McNeill, director of public affairs
• Richard Miller, head of Justice
• Julia Pitman, project manager, 21st Century Justice
• Michael Devlin, policy adviser, 21st Century Justice

What we’ve done so far

In October 2023, we published a Green Paper (PDF 21.3 MB) , which set out our initial ideas for practical, affordable changes to our civil justice system that will increase access to justice.

We launched a consultation asking for feedback on our ideas to help shape them further.

Where we are now

In April 2024, we published an interim report (PDF 1.4 MB) . It sets out the feedback we’ve received alongside further research and engagement we’ve carried out.

The report also details the work we want to do in seven key areas of civil law over the next year to narrow the justice gap for small businesses and those on low incomes:

Our plan of action includes:

• making the case for a publicly-funded online information and guidance tool to help individuals and small businesses identify the nature of their legal issue and triage them to appropriate dispute resolution
• commissioning new research to explore how international models of delivering civil legal aid could work in England and Wales
• convening a cross-industry working group of insurers, solicitors and consumer groups to make legal expenses insurance work better for existing policy holders
• refreshing support and guidance to members offering unbundled legal services, working with regulators and insurers to explore ways to reduce risk and expand insurance cover
• promoting reform of the ombudsman sector as a key part of the dispute resolution landscape, and calling for the Ministry of Justice to take the lead on ombudsman policy
• improving support for small businesses to resolve disputes
• considering what is needed to protect consumers from the risks of using AI in a justice context, including case predictive analytics as well as generative AI tools

The project will also consider what protections might be needed to safeguard consumers working with the increasing amount of emerging dispute resolution providers in the pre-action space, which is currently unregulated.

Richard Atkinson, vice president of the Law Society and chair of the 21st Century Justice Advisory Group said:

“Since we launched the Green Paper last year, we have worked hard to consider the feedback we received through our consultation and undertake additional research and engagement.

“What is clear is that the COVID-19 pandemic, digitalisation and AI have driven a fundamental change in both legal services and the justice system, and in the way consumers connect and engage with them.

“Through this work we want to support our members to adapt and evolve so that they can continue to provide the legal advice people need.

“And with a general election expected this year, all political parties must urgently consider what they will do to protect and enhance a civil justice system that is the cornerstone of the rule of law, a healthy economy and a fair society.”

I want to know more

Read our interim report on the 21st Century Justice project (PDF 1.4 MB)

Explore the research supporting the report:

• Cost-benefit analysis by Social Finance of greater use of non-court dispute resolution by small businesses (PDF 176 KB)
• Qualitative research with firms who practice unbundling (PDF 389 KB)
• Our member survey on legal expenses insurance and unbundling (PDF 606 KB)
• Landscape analysis of the policy and regulatory context of consumer-facing AI by Dr Natalie Byrom of the policy advisory committee (PDF 612 KB)

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• Court reform
• Dispute resolution

RSC Medicinal Chemistry

Integrating a quinone substructure into histone deacetylase inhibitors to cope with alzheimer's disease and cancer †.

* Corresponding authors

a Department for Life Quality Studies, Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna, 47921 Rimini, Italy E-mail: [email protected]

b Department of Chemistry “Giacomo Ciamician”, Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

c Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology, Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna, 40126 Bologna, Italy E-mail: [email protected]

d Department of Drug Science and Technology, University of Turin, 10125 Turin, Italy

Alzheimer's disease (AD) and cancer are among the most devastating diseases of the 21st century. Although the clinical manifestations are different and the cellular mechanisms underlying the pathologies are opposite, there are different classes of molecules that are effective in both diseases, such as quinone-based compounds and histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDACIs). Herein, we investigate the biological effects of a series of compounds built to exploit the beneficial effects of quinones and histone deacetylase inhibition (compounds 1–8 ). Among the different compounds, compound 6 turned out to be a potent cytotoxic agent in SH-SY5Y cancer cell line, with a half maximal inhibitory concentration (IC 50 ) value lower than vorinostat and a pro-apoptotic activity. On the other hand, compound 8 was nontoxic up to the concentration of 100 μM and was highly effective in stimulating the proliferation of neural precursor cells (NPCs), as well as inducing differentiation into neurons, at low micromolar concentrations. In particular, it was able to induce NPC differentiation solely towards a neuronal-specific phenotype, without affecting glial cells commitment.

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• Supplementary information PDF (589K)

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Integrating a quinone substructure into histone deacetylase inhibitors to cope with Alzheimer's disease and cancer

M. Guardigni, G. Greco, E. Poeta, A. Santini, E. Tassinari, C. Bergamini, C. Zalambani, A. De Simone, V. Andrisano, E. Uliassi, B. Monti, M. L. Bolognesi, C. Fimognari and A. Milelli, RSC Med. Chem. , 2024, Advance Article , DOI: 10.1039/D4MD00175C

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