Transforming University Science Education in the New Media Era
This project examines how emerging technologies such as AI, generative writing tools, and XR reshape science education at the university level.
This project investigates how emerging technologies can be used to transform university science education in ways that are pedagogically meaningful, ethically responsible, and discipline-sensitive. The project comprises four interconnected work packages (WPs) that examines how generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), and immersive virtual reality (VR) reshape science teaching and learning by influencing students’ creative problem-solving, conceptual change, disciplinary writing, and embodied engagement with scientific practices. The WPs study these technologies as constitutive of learning, and investigate how they become part of the learning environment, shaping participation, reasoning, assessment, identity, and well-being in higher science education.
The project combines complementary perspectives from chemistry, physics, biology, geology, pharmacy, and geosciences. The first WP investigates AI-mediated learning environments that support human-AI co-creativity, student well-being, and new assessment practices. The second one examines threshold concepts and persistent misconceptions in biology, developing AI-supported instructional models to foster conceptual change. A third WP explores disciplinary writing in geology, asking how writing supports learning, reasoning, and professional socialization in an era of widespread GenAI, and how curricula can integrate AI without undermining core educational goals. Finally, the fourth WP designs and studies GenAI- and VR-enhanced environments that support short- as well as long- term embodied and epistemic engagement with complex scientific concepts and practices in geosciences and other domains.
WP Leader: Associate Professor Chunfang Zhou, SDU
WP1 examines how AI-mediated science learning environments can support students’ creative learning, ethical engagement, and well-being in diverse contexts including classrooms, practical sessions, and informal settings. Mainly, it asks how students engage with AI in everyday study contexts, how science teachers can build pedagogical competence for AI-mediated teaching and assessment, and how AI can be integrated into deep, discipline-based creative learning and future curriculum development.
WP Leader: Assistant Professor Daniela Fielder, UCPH
WP2 focuses on threshold concepts and persistent misconception clusters in university biology, especially in areas such as evolution, ecology, and physiology. It investigates how threshold concepts and misconceptions are represented in biology curricula and teaching practices, and how targeted instructional strategies can influence students’ conceptual understanding and conceptual change. The work is organised in three phases: mapping the conceptual terrain, designing and evaluating targeted GenAI-supported activities, and synthesising findings into an instructional model with cross-context transfer potential. Core activities include curriculum and learning-material analysis, instructor interviews and focus groups, large-scale student surveys, intervention design, pre/post assessment, classroom observations, and the development of an AI-supported diagnostic guideline and toolkit.
WP Leader: Professor Kristine Cecille Harper, UCPH
This WP is primarily situated in ‘Students’ as its USE focal point. It investigates the role of writing in geology as both a tool for learning and a means of disciplinary socialization in a period when GenAI is reshaping writing practices. It investigates the various roles writing practices play in fostering learning in the field sciences under conditions of GenAI use, and the instructional strategies and curricular designs best support meaningful disciplinary writing, thinking, and reasoning. The project adopts a mixed-methods design that combines surveys, document analysis, and qualitative interviews with students and instructors across BSc, MSc, and PhD levels, alongside later collaborative development work with faculty.
WP Leader: Associate Professor Prajakt Pande, AU
WP4 explores how immersive VR and generative AI can be designed to support university science students’ embodied and epistemic engagement with complex scientific concepts and practices. WP researches the affordances of VR and GenAI, how such environments can be aligned with embodied cognition and disciplinary epistemic practices, how students engage with them in the short and long term and across settings, and what design principles can be derived from an embodied-epistemic
perspective. The work is structured around two strands, each developed around a PhD project: one focused on immersive VR environments for sensorimotor engagement with dynamic, multi-scale phenomena, and another focused on GenAI-based scaffolding for embodied reasoning and epistemic participation.
