Major policy changes observed in science education over the past two decades arose from worldwide reform initiatives to conceptualize the purposes and practices of science teaching and learning. In 2012, the National Research Council introduced its Framework for K-12 Science Education in the United States, and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) across countries, representing a paradigm shift in both the definition and assessment of science education [1,2]. The reforms facilitated three-dimensional learning, the articulation of disciplinary core ideas, science and engineering practices, and crosscutting concepts. This shift represents the reframing of science education from an approach that moves beyond content transmission toward an integrated view and engages students in authentic science sensemaking. Despite these reforms, there remain a number of challenges when attempting to materialize the vision for reform to be delivered to students and educators. Keeley and Tugel (2019) [3] argue that curriculum is one vital link between educational policy and how the actual policy plays out in the classroom. Research repeatedly demonstrated gaps between intended curricula and what students actually experience. Curriculum shaping is important to incorporate science learning into education as the salient factor. Moreover, questions about scientific literacy remain debated. Curriculum links the policy of education to classroom practice [3]. It is a method we can use to draw on these goals and put them into concrete experiences for students to make them real. For this reason, knowledge of curriculum design, delivery, and change is vital to enhancing science education outcomes. Curriculum materials help shape what children learn, directly supporting the students’ perception of science as a discipline but also giving them a sense of identity as science learners. In contrast to traditional views in which the focus is only on mastery of content, contemporary scholars have proposed a broader conceptualization of learning, expanding their view of science to include its role of fostering the transformation of society.

This review lay the ground in Roberts’ (2007) [4] basic distinction between Vision I and Vision II of scientific literacy, as well as more recent elaborations of Vision III by Sjöström and Eilks (2018) [5] and Sjöström (2025) [6]. This framework provides a lens for examining how curriculum research conceptualizes the purposes of science education and the nature of scientific literacy. Vision I (science without society) is best manifested in research on curriculum materials and standards that focus primarily on content knowledge and scientific processes. This vision remains instrumental in creating the basis, yet it has departed from content-focused approaches as the core of understanding. There is a significant presence of Vision II (science in relation to society) across specific cohorts with literature on context-based education and learning, socioscientific issues, and technology integration. It emphasizes the use of science in a practical way in various scenarios. Such a phenomenon brings in Vision II work from the field, with its interest in how science education applies to the students’ lives and in terms of societal challenges. Vision III (science within society) represents the most significant study focusing on equity and social justice, critical reflection of curriculum, and transformative approaches to science education. While it accounts for only a small fraction of the literature, Vision III research deals with some of the key questions about the purposes of science education in a democratic society and what role scientific literacy plays in promoting social change. Instead of proposing these visions as disconnected and independent ends, the literature suggests that science education has to be deliberately intertwined into a structure of how conceptual foundations (Vision I), contextual applications (Vision II), and critical engagement (Vision III) feed one another. This synthesis explains how these three visions could be combined in future efforts to highlight their advantages and tensions among them. In today’s rapidly evolving globalized world, these contemporary pedagogical needs are shaped by international crises, technological change, environmental threats, complex socioscientific issues, and future needs and goals. Consequently, scientific literacy is no longer simply a competence in knowledge of science but needs to be versatile and capable of critically and responsibly contributing to building democratic and sustainable futures.

Many fields of science curricula reviews have been discussed, but no systematic evaluation has been conducted to examine the contemporary scholarship using the Vision III framework [6]. This matters because Vision III provides a unified theory of how the curriculum not only fosters scientific understanding but also encourages critical engagement, sociopolitical agency, and transformative action. This literature review is based on 140 articles published in leading science education journals: International Journal of Science Education (57), Science Education (31), Science & Education (18), and Journal of Research in Science Teaching (34). The present review is informed by the following research questions:

RQ1: What are the major categories in the modern science curriculum to foster scientific literacy?

RQ2: In what ways do the findings of these journals resonate with conceptualizations of scientific literacy, specifically on Vision II and Vision III frames?