The internet has become a main source for health-related information retrieval. In addition to information published by medical experts, individuals share their personal experiences and narratives on blogs and social media platforms. Our increasing need to confront and make meaning of various sources and conflicting health information has challenged the way critical reasoning has become relevant in science education. This study addresses how the opportunities for students to develop and practice their capabilities to critically approach online health information can be created in science education. Together with two upper secondary biology teachers, we carried out a design-based study. The participating students were given an online retrieval task that included a search and evaluation of health-related online sources. After a few lessons, the students were introduced to an evaluation tool designed to support critical evaluation of health information online. Using qualitative content analysis, four themes could be discerned in the audio and video recordings of student interactions when engaging with the task. Each theme illustrates the different ways in which critical reasoning became practiced in the student groups. Without using the evaluation tool, the students struggled to overview the vast amount of information and negotiate trustworthiness. Guided by the evaluation tool, critical reasoning was practiced to handle source subjectivity and to sift out scientific information only. Rather than a generic skill and transferable across contexts, students’ critical reasoning became conditioned by the multi-dimensional nature of health issues, the blend of various contexts and the shift of purpose constituted by the students.

This study focuses the emerging need for young people to critically respond to alarming messages in contemporary media highlighting the potential benefits or harms of certain foods. Besides being technical, advancements in the field of nutrition reported in media are often of tentative and speculative character, primarily selected and constructed on the basis of their news value rather than as representing established knowledge. The study aims to study students' capabilities to navigate and critically respond to controversial media messages about health and nutrition in the context of science education. Our theoretical point of departure is in the concept an examined life in the critical reflection tradition of Socrates and the Stoics. We analyze how groups of upper secondary science class students engage in critical examination of a controversial message about cow's milk encountered through Swedish public service news media on the Internet. The results illuminate that even when controversial findings are produced by a reputed university and communicated through independent media, students are capable of discerning the need to scrutinize such findings and are capable of performing such critical examination drawing on experiences of scientific investigations. Students' openness to question authoritative voices in society and to illuminate the new findings on milk from multiple perspectives reflects how an examined life may be enacted in the context of science education. Inviting students to participate in related activities shows promise for enabling a critical examination of themselves and others in ways deemed important for democratic citizenship.

The overarching interest of this study is how science education, when it connects students emotionally to a topic, may contribute to cultivating democratic citizenship in a globalised world. The urge for joint global actions and a mutual sense of responsibility for achieving a sustainable future need to be balanced with consideration for inequalities, accountability and differences in agency among people around the world. This raises questions of what citizens need to know, do and feel in order to respond to the contemporary and future needs of a broader humanity. This study explores how Martha Nussbaum’s notion of 'world citizenship' (1997) may be used to expand the understanding of critical examination of socioscientific controversies in science education. We analyse how groups of upper secondary science students engage in a critical examination of cow’s and oat milk production and consumption from multiple perspectives. The study provides examples of how critical examination of science may be recognised not only in terms of traditionally valued forms (such as source critique) but also as a way to: critically examine norms, traditions and personal habits around milk; recognise oneself as bound to others by ties of concern for human and environmental wellbeing; imagine pathways to a sustainable future; and make moral judgements on the milk cow’s right to life. Establishing science education practices that allow for students’ own constructions of closeness and care rather than rhetoric and resolution in examining tensions and otherness plays an important role in practicing 'world citizenship'.

The advancement of participatory methodologies and educational action research has raised challenges of research ethics that concern the relations between different actors. Different forms of participatory research rest on cooperation between teachers, researchers, and students in different forms of relations. The ways in which these relations are enacted are often related to research objectives, epistemology, the people involved in the study, and the context in which the study is carried out. In this chapter we seek to disentangle some ethical challenges emerging from three different teacher-researcher collaborations in science education research. What values are at stake and what are the potential tensions in attempting to secure different values? This includes the ethical implications of requiring shared responsibility between teachers and researchers in development of educational practices and knowledge generation. We discuss how different forms of teacher-researcher collaboration transform ethics and epistemology and how the ethics and epistemology become intertwined. In addition to standard ethical reflection, an ethics of participatory research in science education has to include considerations of the ontological, epistemological, and methodological values at stake.