Introduction In science education, learning gains meaning not so much through students passively acquiring knowledge, but rather through their ability to generate scientific questions, evaluate evidence, and make reasoned decisions based on these processes. Scientific inquiry enables individuals to examine nature and events from a critical perspective (Holman, 2023; Stegenga, 2026), while science learning strategies play a functional role in the cognitive and metacognitive structuring of the knowledge acquired during this inquiry process (Earle et al., 2025; Ruiz Martín, 2024). Scientific decision-making, on the other hand, stands out as a higher-order learning outcome that reflects the individual’s level of ability to use scientific knowledge in academic and everyday contexts (Busch et al., 2025; Franco-Mariscal, 2024). Within this relational structure, science self-efficacy is considered a fundamental psychological variable that determines the extent to which students feel competent in science-related tasks (Dickson et al., 2023) and shapes the quality of inquiry and learning processes (Gong, 2023).