RESEARCH TRENDS IN SCIENCE EDUCATION IN FOUR CANADIAN UNIVERSITIES AND AHMADU BELLO UNIVERSITY ZARIA, NIGERIA: A COMPARATIVE CONTENT ANALYSIS FOR FIVE YEARS (2015 – 2019 )

Abstract

Over the last decade, the field of science education has witnessed rapid increase in research and innovations across the globe. This is due to the importance of science education in: enhancing citizen’s scientific literacy, promoting scientific and technological capacity of the workforce, and building next generation school science educators (Chang, Ghang & Tseng, 2010). A number of studies have been conducted in science education with the aim of: (1) informing scientific judgments and decisions to improve educational action, (2) providing science teachers with pedagogical knowledge to promote scientific literacy, and (3) revealing existing research gaps for the purpose of providing meaningful insights on what have been studied in the past to understand the future (Cavas et al., 2012). A number of systematic reviews have been conducted to analyze the trends of science education research across different settings. For example, Chang et al. (2010) reviewed more than 3,000 articles in several science education journals from 1990 to 2007 using sciencetometrics method – a method that categorize research topics according to their focus, such as reasoning skill and problem solving, attitude and gender, scientific concept, pedagogical practices, student performance, among others. They concluded that topics such as professional development, nature and attitude towards science, socio-scientific issues and conceptual change and concept mapping were the predominant studies over the years. In a similar study, Lin, Lin, Potvin and Tsai (2018) employed 1,088 published articles from different journals to analyze research trends in science education from 2013 to 2017. Using content analytic approach, the authors found that research topics such as context of students’ learning, science teaching, and students’ conceptual learning were still dominant across the study period. In comparison with last two decades, the authors found that science education researchers have changed their preferences of research topics. For example, research topics concerning conceptual understanding, alternative conceptions