There have been many attempts over the last five decades to measure students’ attitudes towards school science. Many of these studies investigated attitudes towards limited aspects of science and utilized large numbers of items to draw snapshot summaries of the educational landscape. An understanding of attitudes towards science, and how these change over time, is of particular importance to educators in Australia and farther afield, who are forming a response to the continued declines in enrolments seen in post-compulsory science courses. We identify a gap among the available instruments for a tool that can measure multiple facets of attitudes using a minimal number of items, while being suited for use in pre-/post-test and longitudinal studies. In this article we describe the definition, validation and statistical refinement of a digital survey tool using single-item web-based visual analogue scales to measure five key perceptions of school science that lead to the formation of a Science Attitude Profile. We suggest that a particular strength of the resulting data analyses is the ability to provide a comparative ‘does it work?’ critique of various interventions implemented by educators and inform local and national educational policy.

Pragmatic, scalable and sustainable responses to persistent socio-emotional issues such as mathematics anxiety remain elusive. Artificial intelligence (AI) offers a promising approach by enhancing students’ perceptions of competence, control, and value while transforming teacher-student interactions. This paper advocates for a research agenda exploring AI’s role in shaping achievement emotions and calls for a broader shift in educational research toward leveraging AI for meaningful and transformative learning experiences.

The “Maker” movement is a cultural as well as educational phenomenon that has the potential to offer significant opportunities to students in conditions of social, economic and cultural disadvantage. The research reported in this paper, however, suggests that the simple provision of “Maker Spaces” for such activity is simplistic and not sufficient to realise this potential. The research involved a mixed methods study of a cohort of year 7 students (n = 26) in an Australian school located in a socio-economically disadvantaged outer-metropolitan region. The cohort undertook a range of Maker activities at a new “creativity centre” built at the school. Results indicate that the activities had positive impact on student attitudes towards science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) overall, but that the impact was highly specific across attitudinal constructs. A strong ranging effect was also evident, suggesting that the impact of the experience was highly dependent on students’ initial attitudes. Reflecting on these results, the paper also offers a reference framework that may help keep equity in mind when designing different kinds of Maker experience.