When Troy Sadler stepped into a Missouri middle school for a second year of classroom-based science education research, a student stopped him in the hallway with a question.
“Are you doing ‘the antibiotic thing’ again?”
The student had been in a class the previous year, in which Sadler and his team had partnered with a teacher. Together, they designed and implemented a unit on antibiotic-resistant bacteria that integrated socio-scientific issues with the Next Generation Science Standards as a new way to engage students in learning about natural selection.
Sadler told him they were working on a new unit — this time focused on climate change.
With a chuckle, Sadler recalled the student smiling and suddenly sounding much older: “I’m so excited for your students. You do that same thing [and] you are going to rock those kids’ world.” Then the student turned and walked away.
“He was totally sincere,” Sadler said. “He was excited to have us back and for his peers. That was a pretty cool moment.”
Moments like that — when students recognize science as meaningful, relevant to their daily lives, and connected to the world around them — encapsulate what Sadler’s 20+ years in science education research has strived to do.
During that time, he’s been at the forefront of research focused on socio-scientific issues (SSI) — real-world scientific challenges like bioethics, climate science, and viral spread that carry social, political, and ethical implications – and how they can bolster students’ scientific reasoning and how teachers can bring SSI lessons into their classrooms.
For this distinguished research and his commitment to improving science education, Sadler has been selected as the recipient of the NARST 2026 Distinguished Contributions to Science Education through Research Award, the highest honor bestowed by the organization for improving science teaching and learning through research.
The award recognizes scholars whose careers reflect sustained, high-impact research, leadership, and service that have shaped the field of science education. NARST will present the award to Sadler at its 2026 Annual International Conference in Seattle.
A “rewarding” career to bring solutions to science education challenges
Long before earning NARST’s top recognition, Sadler was one of many students graduating from the University of Miami with an undergraduate degree in biology. And, like many soon-to-be and recent biology graduates, he was searching for a career he described as “rewarding.”
He explored several options that seemed like natural next steps. He didn’t find “rewarding” in a white coat or at lab bench. He found it in a science classroom full of middle schoolers.
“I really fell in love with teaching,” Sadler said. “I loved the moments when students would grasp a new idea or get excited about science. That, for me, was exciting.”
After moving to St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1999, Sadler was preparing to begin teaching at a new high school. Free from coaching responsibilities for the first time, he suddenly had space to focus on improving his practice — time that led him, one summer day, to the University of South Florida in Tampa.
“I don’t think there was anyone else in the building, but this professor Dana Ziedler happened to be in his office,” he said. “And he happened to be teaching a doctoral-level seminar focused on moral and ethical issues in science and science education.
“It sounded absolutely fascinating. I had thought a lot about how we deal with ethical issues that come up in science classes — topics around bioethics.”
Sadler took that course with Ziedler and then enrolled in a doctoral program in the University of South Florida School of Education.
Since earning his Ph.D. in 2003, his work has shown how engaging students with these topics can strengthen scientific literacy, critical thinking, and engagement in middle- and high-school science classrooms, while also giving teachers the tools and support to navigate complex, real-world science.
Sadler’s research focused on how students reason through complex scientific issues has led to field-leading assessments. He developed the concept of “socio-scientific reasoning” as an assessment construct for operationalizing student reasoning in the context of SSI and led the creation of the Quantitative Assessment of Socio-scientific Reasoning (QuASSR), now widely seen as the standard for researchers studying socio-scientific issues in science classrooms.
One of Sadler’s nominators called SSI-related research “one of the most important areas of science education scholarship” citing the current “prevalence of SSI, public misunderstanding and mistrust of science, and declining student motivation to engage with science.”
From foundational work on informal reasoning to more recent socio-scientific system modeling, Sadler has continued to expand science education research — and, most importantly, to bring real-world scientific challenges into classrooms for learners who will one day help lead solutions to those challenges.
Teacher- and student-focused research
Before joining UNC-Chapel Hill in 2019, Sadler held faculty roles at Indiana University, the University of Florida, the University of Missouri, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
During his time at Missouri, Sadler recalled collaborating with a biology teacher who wanted to create a more practical model for integrating SSI into her classroom that aligned with Next Generation Science Standards, which were new to Missouri at the time.
“She was dealing with all of the constraints teachers deal with — there’s never enough time, you’re always worried about standardized testing, there are too many students in the classroom, not enough resources — but she was so excited to partner with us.”
Together, Sadler, the teacher, and colleagues designed a unit on antibioticâresistant bacteria that integrated socioâscientific issues with the Next Generation Science Standards to engage students in learning about natural selection.
“I got to watch her implement all of this, and, man, it was cool to see,” Sadler said, remembering his vantage point from the back of the classroom. “She was amazing. The unit materials were successful. Her kids were super excited.”
That kind of classroom-rooted work proved especially critical when the COVID-19 pandemic reached the United States in early 2020. Few science educators were prepared to help students understand the complex world event and associated issues emerging before them.
Sadler applied for and received an NSF RAPID grant to quickly respond to science teacher needs. His team developed learning materials for high school science students to understand COVID-19 and position them to make evidence-based health decisions for themselves and their communities.
The earliest of those materials were available for use in April 2020. By the beginning of the next school year, teachers across the U.S. were using the curriculum.
“Many science teachers conceptually embrace sociocentric issues as anchor for instruction, but teachers have limited access to making this possible (i.e. materials, time, concerns of backlash, standards-based curriculum, etc.),” Sadler said.
Additional NSF funding helped Sadler develop more comprehensive curriculum materials that focused on viral epidemics and pandemics. These materials used scientific modeling — asking students to create diagrams or maps to visualize complex science systems — to show how factors like mask wearing or vaccine adoption influence viral spread.
Since publishing the initial pandemic-focused materials in 2022, Sadler has heard from scholars and educators across the globe — from Australia, China, Germany, Indonesia, Israel, and Turkey — who are using the instructional frameworks, assessment tools, or curriculum tools his team developed.
The international interest garnered by his work underscores what one nominator wrote of Sadler’s research: “[It] has helped to change the way the science education community considers social relevancy of teaching contexts and how to teach to the strengths, ideas, and perspectives that learners bring to the classroom.”
A leader and mentor in science education
Over the course of his career, Sadler has distinguished himself as a prolific researcher. He has contributed 136 refereed journal articles, 38 book chapters, and 112 conference papers, among additional scholarly writings. He has also delivered 63 invited seminars and presentations. His research has garnered external support – from funders that, most notably, include the National Science Foundation – totaling $36.8 million.
From 2020-2025, Sadler served as an editor-in-chief, with Felicia Moore Mensah of Teachers College at Columbia University, of the Journal of Research in Science Teaching — the leading academic journal in the field of science education.
He’s served on the editorial boards of the book series “Contemporary Trends and Issues in Science Education, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Journal of Science Teacher Education, Research in Science Education, and Science Education.
He’s held more than a dozen roles on NARST boards and committees and held a number of leadership and service roles in additional professional organizations that include the American Educational Research Association, Institute of Education Sciences, National Science Foundation, and National Science Teachers Association.
In February 2026, it was announced that Sadler has been elected president-elect of the NARST Board of Directors and will serve as president in 2027.
Equal to his scholarly output, nominators praised Sadler’s commitment to his peers and mentoring emerging scholars and students. In 2025, he received the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Faculty Award for Excellence in Doctoral Mentoring.
But for Sadler, the measure of impact still comes back to classrooms — and to students like the one he met in that Missouri hallway.
“That’s what it’s all about,” he said. “Creating learning experiences that matter to students, that connect science to the real world, and that prepare them to work together on the challenges they’ll inherit.”
