The role of socioscientific issues in biology teaching: from the perspective of teachers

ABSTRACT

Previous research has documented that students who engage with socioscientific issues can acquire some of the complex competences and skills typically related to scientific literacy. But an emerging field of research on science teachers’ understanding and use of socioscientific issues, has documented that a range of challenges hinders the uptake of socioscientific issues. In this study, we investigated the interpretation and implementation of socioscientific issues among Danish biology teachers. We conducted five in-depth group interviews and validated the emergent themes from the teachers’ talk-in-interaction by distributing a questionnaire. Our findings suggest that the participating teachers generally harbour a content-centred interpretation of socioscientific issues which manifests itself in at least three separate ways. First, the teachers generally use socioscientific issues as a vehicle to teach factual biological content. Second, the teachers emphasised mastery of factual content in their assessment. Third, the teachers tended to reduce socioscientific issues to specific biological contents in a way may preclude students from engaging with the real socioscientific issue. Our findings are particularly significant for science educators, policy-makers and curriculum designers, as we argue that key aspects of this content-centred interpretation may be a coping strategy used to navigate a divided curriculum.     

Science and Language Teachers’ Assessment of Upper Secondary Students’ Socioscientific Argumentation

Researchers and policy-makers have recognized the importance of including and promoting socioscientific argumentation in science education worldwide. The Swedish curriculum focuses more than ever on socioscientific issues (SSI) as well. However, teaching socioscientific argumentation is not an easy task for science teachers and one of the more distinguished difficulties is the assessment of students’ performance. In this study, we investigate and compare how science and Swedish language teachers, participating in an SSI-driven project, assessed students’ written argumentation about global warming. Swedish language teachers have a long history of teaching and assessing argumentation and therefore it was of interest to identify possible gaps between the two groups of teachers’ assessment practices. The results showed that the science teachers focused on students’ content knowledge within their subjects, whereas the Swedish language teachers included students’ abilities to select and use content knowledge from reliable reference resources, the structure of the argumentation and the form of language used. Since the Swedish language teachers’ assessment correlated more with previous research about quality in socioscientific argumentation, we suggest that a closer co-operation between the two groups could be beneficial in terms of enhancing the quality of assessment. Moreover, SSI teaching and learning as well as assessment of socioscientific argumentation ought to be included in teacher training programs for both pre- and in-service science teachers.     

Using our Heads and HARTSS*: Developing Perspective-Taking Skills for Socioscientific Reasoning (*Humanities,ARTs, and Social Sciences)

Functional scientific literacy demands an informed citizenry capable of negotiating controversial socioscientific issues (SSI). Perspective taking is critical to SSI implementation as it enables understanding of the diverse cognitive and emotional perspectives of others. Science teacher educators must therefore facilitate teachers’ promotion of classroom environments that value diverse perspectives. The purpose of this theoretical paper is to propose the HARTSS model through which successful practices that promote perspective taking in the humanities, arts, and social sciences are identified and translated into socioscientific contexts, thereby developing an array of promising interventions designed for science teacher educators to foster perspective taking in current and future science teachers and their students.     

The Effects of Socio-scientific Instruction on Pre-Service Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy for Learning and Teaching Controversial Family Health Issues

This research investigates the effects of socioscientific instruction on pre-service teachers’ sense of efficacy in the teaching and learning of controversial family health issues. For this purpose, a total of 251 students from two teacher training colleges participated in the study and were randomly assigned as experimental and control groups. The experimental group was taught the contents of the controversial family health issues using socioscientific instruction approach and the control group was taught the same content using a more traditional approach. Quantitative data were obtained from both groups after responding to the ‘Teacher sense of Efficacy Scale’ as instrument used for data collection before and after the treatments. Analysis of covariance was used in data analysis of which the pre-treatment scores were used as covariates. Qualitative interviews were conducted with ten participants randomly selected from the experimental group before and after the treatment to deepen and elaborate the quantitative data. The quantitative and qualitative findings indicate that the integration of the socioscientific instruction have significantly affected the pre-service teachers’ sense of efficacy in favour of the experimental group that shows a more stronger sense of efficacy. It was concluded that the socioscientific instruction is significantly effective in changing the pre-service teachers’ weaker sense of efficacy to a stronger one in the controversial family health issues.

     

The Effects of Socio-scientific Instruction on Pre-Service Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy for Learning and Teaching Controversial Family Health Issues

This research investigates the effects of socioscientific instruction on pre-service teachers’ sense of efficacy in the teaching and learning of controversial family health issues. For this purpose, a total of 251 students from two teacher training colleges participated in the study and were randomly assigned as experimental and control groups. The experimental group was taught the contents of the controversial family health issues using socioscientific instruction approach and the control group was taught the same content using a more traditional approach. Quantitative data were obtained from both groups after responding to the ‘Teacher sense of Efficacy Scale’ as instrument used for data collection before and after the treatments. Analysis of covariance was used in data analysis of which the pre-treatment scores were used as covariates. Qualitative interviews were conducted with ten participants randomly selected from the experimental group before and after the treatment to deepen and elaborate the quantitative data. The quantitative and qualitative findings indicate that the integration of the socioscientific instruction have significantly affected the pre-service teachers’ sense of efficacy in favour of the experimental group that shows a more stronger sense of efficacy. It was concluded that the socioscientific instruction is significantly effective in changing the pre-service teachers’ weaker sense of efficacy to a stronger one in the controversial family health issues.     

Perceptions,challenges and coping strategies of science teachers in teaching socioscientific issues: A systematic review

Science education in recent years has increasingly emphasized the connections between knowledge and matters of social importance. Socioscientific issues (SSIs)—complex, often controversial issues linked to the development of science and technology—are widely recognized as a valuable arena for the school curriculum to foster students’ scientific literacy. This paper reviews the research literature on how science teachers teach socioscientific issues with 25 empirical studies published between 2004 and 2019. The results show that teachers generally hold a partially informed understanding of SSI-based teaching. Multifarious challenges facing teachers in teaching SSIs are mainly at the teacher, student, and policy levels. However, our findings suggest that teachers lack explicit strategies to cope with these challenges and that SSI-based teaching should not rely on individual teachers alone. We argue for more support for teachers to improve the quality of their implementation of SSIs. This review has implications for education policymakers, teacher educators, school leaders, and teachers to respond to the challenges facing teachers in teaching SSIs collaboratively. Potential directions for further research are also discussed.     

A Pedagogical Model for Ethical Inquiry into Socioscientific Issues In Science

Internationally there is concern that many science teachers do not address socioscientific issues (SSI) in their classrooms, particularly those that are controversial. However with increasingly complex, science-based dilemmas being presented to society, such as cloning, genetic screening, alternative fuels, reproductive technologies and vaccination, there is a growing call for students to be more scientifically literate and to be able to make informed decisions on issues related to these dilemmas. There have been shifts in science curricula internationally towards a focus on scientific literacy, but research indicates that many secondary science teachers lack the support and confidence to address SSI in their classrooms. This paper reports on a project that developed a pedagogical model that scaffolded teachers through a series of stages in exploring a controversial socioscientific issue with students and supported them in the use of pedagogical strategies and facilitated ways of ethical thinking. The study builds on existing frameworks of ethical thinking. It presents an argument that in today’s increasingly pluralistic society, these traditional frameworks need to be extended to acknowledge other worldviews and identities. Pluralism is proposed as an additional framework of ethical thinking in the pedagogical model, from which multiple identities, including cultural, ethnic, religious and gender perspectives, can be explored.     

Associations Between Attitudes Towards Science and Children’s Evaluation of Information About Socioscientific Issues

Science educators are typically dismayed by the failure of students to use relevant scientific knowledge when reasoning about socioscientific issues. Except for the well-documented association between having more knowledge about a topic and a tendency to use that knowledge, the influences on students’ evaluation of information in socioscientific issues are not well understood. This study presents an initial investigation into the associations between upper elementary students’ attitudes towards science and their evaluation of information about a socioscientific issue. We surveyed the science attitudes of 49 sixth grade students and then asked them to evaluate information about a socioscientific issue (alternative energy use). Positive attitudes were associated with a more scientific approach to evaluating information in the task. When trying to make judgments, students with generally positive attitudes towards science were more likely to attend to scientific information than other sources. Scientific information, nonetheless, served a variety of socially oriented goals in students’ evaluations. These findings warrant further research on the relationship between science attitudes and reasoning about socioscientific issues and support the argument for connecting school science more clearly with everyday concerns.     

Exploring preservice elementary teachers’ critique and adaptation of science curriculum materials in respect to socioscientific issues

The work presented here represents a preliminary effort undertaken to address the role of teachers in supporting students’ learning and decision-making about socioscientific issues (SSI) by characterizing preservice elementary teachers’ critique and adaptation of SSI-based science curriculum materials and identifying factors that serve to mediate this process. Four undergraduate preservice elementary teachers were studied over the course of one semester. Results indicate that the teachers navigated multiple learning goals, as well as their own subject-matter knowledge, informal reasoning about SSI, and role identity, in their critique and adaptation of SSI-oriented science instructional materials. Implications for science teacher education and the design of curriculum materials in respect to SSI are discussed.     

Socioscientific issues in science education: labels, reasoning, and transfer

This paper provides a critical analysis of some of the issues raised in Simonneaux and Simonneaux’s analysis of socioscientific reasoning among a group of university level students negotiating three socioscientific issues. I first discuss the labels used to reference approaches in science education that prioritize socially relevant issues and the science related to these issues. I draw distinctions between approaches labeled science-technology-society (STS), the socioscientific issues framework, and les questions socialement vives (socially acute questions), which Simonneaux and Simonneaux introduce. Next, I discuss ways in which Simonneaux and Simonneaux’s use socioscientific reasoning as an analytic construct varies with respect to its initial conceptualization. The primary distinctions include linguistic inconsistencies and the conceptual differences these language choices confer, expansion of the construct to subsume a broader range of practices, and issues related to unit of analysis (i.e., applying socioscientific reasoning as an analytic resource for assessing individual practice vs. group patterns). Finally, the issue of transfer of socioscientific reasoning is addressed. When considering the extent to which and how students leverage experiences and practice relative to the exploration of one socioscientific issue to inform their negotiation of another, I suggest that researchers and practitioners consider the distinction between the content of arguments advanced and underlying reasoning patterns. The tension between embedding science in meaningful, specific contexts and promoting forms of scientific literacy applicable to diverse, socially-relevant issues emerges as an important point of emphasis for educators interested in the socioscientific issues (or socially acute questions) movement.

Argument as Professional Development: Impacting Teacher Knowledge and Beliefs About Science

Using a case study method, the experiences of a group of high school science teachers participating in a unique professional development method involving an argue-to-learn intervention were examined. The participants (N?=?42) represented 25 different high schools from a large urban school district in the southwestern United States. Data sources included a multiple-choice science content test and artifacts from a capstone argument project. Findings indicate although it was intended for the curriculum to be a robust and sufficient collection of evidence, participant groups were more likely to use the Web to find unique evidence than to they were to use the provided materials. Content knowledge increased, but an issue with teacher conceptions of primary data was identified, as none of the participants chose to use any of their experimental results in their final arguments. The results of this study reinforce multiple calls for science curricula that engage students (including teachers as students) in the manipulation and questioning of authentic data as a means to better understanding complex socioscientific issues and the nature of science.     

What Do Students Gain by Engaging in Socioscientific Inquiry?

The question of what students gain by engaging in socioscientific inquiry is addressed in two ways. First, relevant literature is surveyed to build the case that socioscientific issues (SSI) can serve as useful contexts for teaching and learning science content. Studies are reviewed which document student gains in discipline specific content knowledge as well as understandings of the nature of science. SSI are also positioned as vehicles for addressing citizenship education within science classrooms. Although the promotion of citizenship goals seems widely advocated, the specifics of how this may be accomplished remain underdeveloped. To address this issue, we introduce socioscientific reasoning as a construct which captures a suite of practices fundamental to the negotiation of SSI. In the second phase of the project, interviews with 24 middle school students from classes engaged in socioscientific inquiry serve as the basis for the development of an emergent rubric for socioscientific reasoning. Variation in practices demonstrated by this sample are explored and implications drawn for advancing socioscientific reasoning as an educationally meaningful and assessable construct.     

Science Teachers Taking their First Steps toward Teaching Socioscientific Issues through Collaborative Action Research

Research in Science Education - This study presents two science teachers, Catherine and Jennifer, who took their first steps toward teaching socioscientific issues through collaborative action...     

Instructional efficiency of different discussion approaches in an outreach laboratory: Teacher-guided versus student-centered

Given the rapid development of modern biotechnology, attention to socioscientific issues in educational contexts is crucially important to support students in becoming responsible citizens. The authors' research focused on the impact of discussing socioscientific issues during biology lessons under 3 different treatments (teacher guided, student centered, text only), comparing these treatments with regard to cognitive achievement, cognitive load, and instructional efficiency. The biology lessons were part of an educational intervention with Bavarian 10th-grade students (N = 583) in an out-of-school laboratory on plant genetic engineering. The teacher-guided group performed significantly better regarding knowledge increase, while the cognitive load of the student-centered group was significantly higher. Accordingly, teacher-guided discussion led to the highest instructional efficiency, suggesting an enhanced cognitive achievement through the teacher's guidance. However, a student-centered approach allows students to contribute more of their own opinions, making further research in this area desirable. Finally, we discuss potential implications for teaching and teacher education.     

Turkish Preservice Science Teachers’ Informal Reasoning Regarding Socioscientific Issues and the Factors Influencing Their Informal Reasoning

The purpose of the study is to explore Turkish preservice science teachers’ informal reasoning regarding socioscientific issues and the factors influencing their informal reasoning. The researchers engaged 39 preservice science teachers in informal reasoning interview and moral decision-making interview protocols. Of the seven socioscientific issues, three issues were related to gene therapy, another three were related to human cloning, and one was related to global warming. The data were analyzed using an interpretive qualitative research approach. The characteristic of informal reasoning was determined as multidimensional, and the patterns of informal reasoning emerged as rationalistic, emotive, and intuitive reasoning. The factors influencing informal reasoning were: personal experiences, social considerations, moral-ethical considerations, and technological concerns.     

Socioscientific Issues as a Vehicle for Promoting Character and Values for Global Citizens

Our guiding presupposition in this study was that socioscientific issues (SSI) instruction, given the humanistic features that comprise this type of instruction, could play a role as a vehicle for cultivating character and values as global citizens. Our main objective was to observe how and to what extent SSI instruction might contribute to this. In order to achieve this aim, we implemented a SSI program on genetic modification technology for 132 ninth-grade students over 3–4 weeks and identified its educational effects using a mixed method approach. Data sources included student responses to questionnaire items that measure the students' character and values, records of student discussions, and semi-structured interviews with the students and their teachers. Results indicated that the students became more sensitive to moral and ethical aspects of scientific and technological development and compassionate to diverse people who are either alienated by the benefits of advanced technology or who are vulnerable to the dangers of its unintended effects. In addition, the students felt more responsible for the future resolution of the genetic SSI. However, the students struggled to demonstrate willingness and efficacy to participate within broader communities that entailed action toward SSI resolution.     

Disconnections Between Teacher Expectations and Student Confidence in Bioethics

This study examines how student practice of scientific argumentation using socioscientific bioethics issues affects both teacher expectations of students’ general performance and student confidence in their own work. When teachers use bioethical issues in the classroom students can gain not only biology content knowledge but also important decision-making skills. Learning bioethics through scientific argumentation gives students opportunities to express their ideas, formulate educated opinions and value others’ viewpoints. Research has shown that science teachers’ expectations of student success and knowledge directly influence student achievement and confidence levels. Our study analyzes pre-course and post-course surveys completed by students enrolled in a university level bioethics course (n = 111) and by faculty in the College of Biology and Agriculture faculty (n = 34) based on their perceptions of student confidence. Additionally, student data were collected from classroom observations and interviews. Data analysis showed a disconnect between faculty and students perceptions of confidence for both knowledge and the use of science argumentation. Student reports of their confidence levels regarding various bioethical issues were higher than faculty reports. A further disconnect showed up between students’ preferred learning styles and the general faculty’s common teaching methods; students learned more by practicing scientific argumentation than listening to traditional lectures. Students who completed a bioethics course that included practice in scientific argumentation, significantly increased their confidence levels. This study suggests that professors’ expectations and teaching styles influence student confidence levels in both knowledge and scientific argumentation.     

Students’ Experience of Working with Socioscientific Issues - a Quantitative Study in Secondary School

This research project aims to investigate how students in lower secondary school experience work with socioscientific issues (SSI). The six socioscientific cases developed and used in this project are relevant according to characteristics of SSI and to the national curriculum. Approximately 1,500 students in Sweden have worked with one SSI case chosen by the teachers. A questionnaire-based instrument was used to measure the affective domain of students?? attitudes towards and interest in science before starting to work with the case and a second questionnaire after finishing a case. The second student questionnaire, measured the situational characteristics of the SSI work and perceived cognitive and affective outcomes. According to the students?? self-reported experience, all cases were interesting and related to a current issue. Most cases were equally interesting to boys and girls, the only exception was You are what you eat, which girls found more interesting than boys did. Almost all students claim that they learnt new facts, learnt to argue for their standpoint and to search and evaluate information during the work with the cases. The girls?? average scores were higher on several aspects of learning outcomes. Furthermore the students, especially the girls, perceived that the outcome of working with SSI had relevance for their future, with some cases more relevant than others. The more interesting the student found the case, the more they claimed they learnt. The students do not, however, claim that they learnt more science than during ordinary lessons.     

LEARNING ARGUMENTATION SKILLS THROUGH INSTRUCTION IN SOCIOSCIENTIFIC ISSUES: THE EFFECT OF ABILITY LEVEL

This article describes an effort to explore and enhance argumentation skills of Taiwanese grade 6 students through instruction in socioscientific issues. An experienced elementary school teacher was given 8 months of personalized instruction on argumentation skills and socioscientific issues, then subsequently implemented a 17-h classroom unit on the establishment of Ma-Guo National Park. His students learned to establish claims and warrants, construct counterarguments, offer supportive arguments, and provide evidence for each one. Data consisted of student responses to questionnaires and individual follow-up interviews. A multiple regression analysis revealed that success in learning argumentation skills was not substantially related to pre-instruction argumentation skills, but significantly related to the student ability levels. High-ability students were significantly better than low-ability students at generating complete arguments. Most students elaborated their arguments, and more high-ability students offered rebuttals after instruction. However, even these high achievers did not completely understand the meaning of evidence and often misused supplementary warrants as evidence.