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1. Science Diplomacy - To 2030 and Beyond

   Talloires, Dialogue Team (January 2019, Science diplomacy action)

   The 2nd International Dialogue on Science and Technology Advice in Foreign Ministries was co‐convened at the Tufts European Center in Talloires, France, from 15‐17 September 2017 by the International Network for Government Science Advice (INGSA) and the Science Diplomacy Center (Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University). ‘The Talloires Dialogue’ engaged the Foreign Ministries Science and Technology Advice Network (FMSTAN) and other representatives from foreign ministries of sixteen nations to address developments in our globally‐interconnected civilization that require science and technology advice for informed decision‐making. Multi‐stakeholder fora, including INGSA and FMSTAN, provide global and international venues for dialogues among allies and adversaries alike to build common interests with continuous progress, responding to crises and emergencies, disruptive technologies, global spaces and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals beyond 2030 on a planetary scale. Progress with science diplomacy was discussed as an evolving international, interdisciplinary and inclusive process that requires training to balance national interests and common interests for the benefit of all on Earth across generations. 

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2. Evolution of Science Diplomacy and its Local-Global Applications

   Berkman, P.A. (January 2019, European foreign affairs review)

   The unambiguous reality of human civilization is that we now are globally interconnected. This fact is revealed by ‘world wars’, which happened for the first time in the history of humankind only in the last century. In context, global human population size has grown more than 1000% since the advent of the nation-state with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. During this period, the influence of Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) has been expanding, certainly since the industrial revolution around 1800 when the human population reached 1 billion, accelerating to 8 billion people as we enter the next decade during our digital revolution. The challenges are on a planetary scale, as reflected further by concern about Earth’s climate, crossing the spectrum of sub-national to international jurisdictions with the nation-state at the centre. As an example, science diplomacy from the polar regions illustrates how transatlantic science relations are embedded into a global context. With hope and inspiration from the perspective of a practitioner and observer, the evolution of science diplomacy is shared herein with local-global applications as an international, interdisciplinary and inclusive (holistic) process, involving informed decision-making to balance national interests and common interests for the benefit of all on Earth across generations. 

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3. A Bayesian Analysis of Adolescent STEM Interest Using Minecraft

   Gadbury, Matt; Lane, H Chad (June 2023, Springer)

   Wang, N; Rebolledo-Mendez, G; Dimitrova, V; Matsuda, N; Santos, O C (Ed.)

   Minecraft continues to be a popular digital game throughout the world, and the ways in which adolescents play can provide insight into their existing interests. Through informal summer camps using Minecraft to expose middle school students to concepts in astronomy and earth science, we collected self-reports of STEM and Minecraft interest, as well as behavioral log data through player in-game interactions. Finding relationships between in-game behaviors and individual interest can provide insight into how educational experiences in digital games might be designed to support learner interests and competencies in STEM. Bayesian model averaging of data across camps was implemented to address the relatively small sample size of the data. Results revealed the important role of existing interest and knowledge for developing and sustaining interest. 

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4. Examining Science Teachers’ Conceptions of Student Interest as a Consideration in Designing Assessments

   https://doi.org/10.1080/1046560X.2024.2435747  

   Penuel, William R; O’Connor, Keelin; Allen, Anna-Ruth; Jacobs, Jennifer K; Lo, Abraham S (December 2024, Journal of Science Teacher Education)

   A key goal of science education articulated in A Framework for K-12 Science Education is to create opportunities for students to answer questions about the world that connect to their interests, experiences, and identities. Interest can be seen as a malleable relationship between a person and object (such a phenomenon students might study). In this paper, we analyzed data from a design study of an online course focused on preparing 11 secondary teachers to design three-dimensional tasks that align to the Next Generation Science Standards and that connect to students’ interests. Our data sources were teachers’ descriptions of their design decisions about what phenomena to use to anchor assessment, designed assessment tasks, and interviews with them about those decisions. We found that interest was an important consideration for assessment design, but they considered student interests in different ways. Some teachers shifted their views of what it meant to engage student interests in the context of assessment design over the course of their participation in professional learning. Most teachers made decisions about what they believed their students were interested in based on their knowledge of students or beliefs about their students’ interests. In supporting teachers to design summative assessments that link to students’ interest, it is critical to assume teachers bring a range of conceptions of interest, and to consider the feasibility and utility of task design tools from teachers’ point of view. 

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5. Participatory Design as a Mechanism for Informing an Interest-Driven Data Science Curriculum

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3772279  

   Israel-Fishelson, Rotem; Weintrop, David (October 2025, ACM Transactions on Computing Education)

   Objectives:Interest plays a central role in learning by shaping what, how, when, where, and why learning occurs. In data science education, where complex concepts, lived experiences, and practical skills intersect, capturing and cultivating student interest can be especially generative. This work explores approaches for designing and evaluating interest-driven data science instructional materials.Methods:This paper presents a participatory design study that informs the development of a data science curriculum for high school students. To assess how well learner interests and values are reflected in the resulting curriculum, we used the Integrated Interest Development for Computing Education Framework [56], which provides a concrete operationalization of interest that captures its multifaceted nature.Findings:The paper demonstrates and discusses how participatory design can be used to identify students’ interests and how those interests can be used to inform the creation of an interest-driven curriculum. Further, it highlights how different types of participatory design activities yield insight into different facets of students’ interests and identities, which can then be used to design learning experiences. This work shows how the resulting PD reflects and harnesses the multifaceted nature of student interest and how it can be leveraged to design learning experiences that connect with learners’ lived digital experiences.Conclusions:Participatory design is an effective student-centered approach for tailoring computational learning experiences aligned to students’ voices, values, and interests. The use of various participatory design activities revealed different facets of students’ interests that informed the creation of an interest-driven curriculum that could not have been created without the input of the students themselves. 

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