This article describes a teaching experience at an year 8 classroom (students aged 12-13) in a state secondary school in London, UK that aimed at widening learning about nature of science (NOS) with the input from the field of Global History of Science (HOS), which looks at science as a product of material and cognitive exchanges, appropriations…

Socioscientific issues (SSI) have been found to improve scientific literacy skills among K-12 students. Elementary preservice teachers (PSTs), however, are reluctant to implement SSI due to a lack of confidence with content knowledge concerning SSI and pedagogical abilities. Existing research focuses on helping PSTs overcome these concerns through…

The purpose of the current study is to reveal students' environmental attitudes, their informal reasoning, and how their informal reasoning on a socioscientific issue changes depending on their environmental attitudes. The study participants were 104 eighth-grade students. A form consisting of a scenario and open-ended questions was used as data…

This study is based on the Reconceptualised Family Resemblance Approach to Nature of Science (Kaya & Erduran, 2016), which explains science as a cognitive, epistemic, and social-institutional system. A content analysis of Turkish science curricula shows that the social context of science is underemphasised (Kaya & Erduran, 2016).…

The study focuses on the socio-scientific dilemma which arises in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and is frequently voiced in the society and media: "Should we get a COVID-19 vaccine or not?" The study group of the study were selected via holistic single case study design, one of the qualitative research methods, is comprised of…

The aim of this study is to find out effects of science teaching through Science-Technology-Society [STT] approach on elementary school students' creative thinking skills, attitudes towards science lesson, and academic success. To this end, a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design without the control group was used among quantitative research…

Aim of this research is to examine the effect of the use of the socio-scientific argumentation method on students' entrepreneurial perceptions in the middle school science course. In the study, quasi-experimental design with pretest-posttest control group, as one of the quantitative research, was used. Experiment and control groups were formed…

Complexities of social problems in our globalised world pose new educational challenges, including how to empower citizens for active engagement with socioscientific issues. This study describes the analysis and discussion of an activist video as the first phase in an activist education programme. Participants were 104 preservice primary teachers…

The aim of this mixed-method study is twofold: The first aim concerns pre-service science teachers' (PSTs) perceptions about what makes an argument persuasive. At the first phase, an in-depth analysis of their views about persuasiveness of different quality level arguments in three socioscientific contexts which were global climate change, base…

The social dimension of chemistry is relevant and present in numerous socio-scientific issues, for example, the use of plastics. These issues can be covered at school by implementing strategies such as role-playing, which allow different perspectives to be understood, thereby helping to promote changes in attitude. This paper presents a…

Recent policy documents position engineering as a way to broaden participation for students in STEM fields. However, a recent review of the literature on engineering education found that fewer than 1% of reviewed articles focused on issues of equity and broadening participation. For this reason, there are few frameworks to build on when designing…

This synthesis aims to see the effects of Socio-scientific Issues-Based Instruction (SSI) on the academic achievement of students in Turkey and to help shape future studies on this topic. A mixed-research synthesis method was employed in this study. As a result of the data searching process, 12 studies with quantitative data and 6 studies with…

Socio-scientific issues (SSIs) are real-life problems which have a scientific basis yet require the consideration of social concerns. Using SSIs has been advocated as an approach to engage secondary-school students with science and this study aimed to explore the potential of such an approach in the primary-school classroom. The experiences and…

Argumentation research often addresses the nature of argumentation as a complex set of procedures that can aid learning of complex scientific knowledge and practices. Thus, studies might look at transfer of knowledge and processes to specific science domains or to other types of procedural knowledge, such as teacher implementation in the…

Purpose: Since developing science literacy is a primary objective of science education and socio-scientific (SSI) decision-making is an important aspect of science literacy, it is valuable to explore how students structure their decisions related to SSIs, and how they discuss and solve SSIs. The aim of present study was to examine elementary…