With the hope of promoting awareness of the importance of this topic and past research on it,
the rest of this article provides (A) my hypothesis why affect has been under-attended to by the
science education research community and the ramifications of this under-attendance and (B) an
overview of the research on affect in science education that has been published in JRST, SciEd,
and IJSE between 2001 and 2011. I have made no attempt to synthesize or do a meta-analysis of
this research; my purpose is to provide readers with a sense of some of the important work that has
been done, to guide researchers and teachers to articles that may be relevant to their work, and to
point out some weaknesses that should be avoided in the future. The overview ends by directing
readers to a virtual issue of JRST on affect which presents some excellent examples of studies on
affect that were published by JRSTin the past decade.