The purpose of the current study is to determine the trends in M.A and Ph.D. theses on socio-scientific issues. To this end, thesis studies completed between 2008 and 2018 on socio-scientific issues were analyzed in terms of the year of thesis and publication type, the university where the thesis is done, the purpose of the thesis, research…

Insights and methods from the chemical sciences are directly relevant to global challenges such as climate change, renewable energy generation and storage, water purification, and food production. However, these connections are often opaque to students in general chemistry courses, who may get lost in the weeds of stoichiometry, VSEPR, and gas…

One of the challenges that science teachers face is the lack of strategy/method to train students in data collection and developing analytical skills, which are pre-requisites to resolve socio-scientific problems and an important element in scientific literacy. In this activity, the SWOT analysis proposed by the Stanford Research Institute in the…

As humanity around the globe enters the third decade of the 21st century, immense technological change is more profound than any previous time with pursuant massive social change. Central to this change is the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0). Three revolutions have gone before: mechanisation, mass production, and simple…

Consideration of socioscientific issues (SSIs) promotes the development of moral and sociocultural perspectives that encourage a rich understanding of the nature of science. The use of moral reasoning to approach SSIs is known to influence how students justify arguments and persuade others; less is known about how student moral reasoning is…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of media literacy and attitudes towards socioscientific issues as two major predictors of informal reasoning. A sample of 208 preservice science teachers completed an open-ended informal reasoning questionnaire on hydroelectric power plant issue, media literacy level determination scale, and…

Discourse surrounding the role of science in modern society has been characterized by increasing scrutiny and skepticism. To address this, scientists have increasingly felt a need to share their results and engage with public audiences through public engagement. Historically, public engagement has been based on the deficit model, which attributes…

Science and society are inseparably linked, shaping each other in ways that define our world, emphasizing the need to teach science for empowering students capable of taking meaningful action toward building a sustainable and just society. Developing sustainability competencies in students is an important step toward this goal, with controversial…

Purpose: Goal 4.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) explicitly frames education as an enabler of change and a means to achieve all SDGs. This study aims to explore the nature and culture of science as an academic discipline and its capacity for the integration of education for sustainable development (ESD). Design/methodology/approach:…

This study was carried out in order to determine what postgraduate science teachers perceive when socio scientific issues are mentioned, how they teach these subjects, what difficulties they encounter during teaching the subjects and what they need during the teaching of socio scientific issues. For this purpose, three groups of interviews were…

This article presents a study of a full-day, university-organized, online hackathon that aimed at designing solutions to problems raised in remote learning and teaching. The event, with about 80 participants, was carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic when many schools were closed and shifted to emergency remote teaching. The hackathon…

Although argumentation is a critical historical component of scientific literacy, the recent coronavirus pandemic and associated issues have highlighted the importance of argumentation in science practice. Argumentation that aligns with functional scientific literacy requires gathering evidence and reasoning to support or refute claims related to…

Although chemistry-focused socio-scientific issues support the 'relevance' model of chemistry education, the related literature has lacked any systematic review handling them together. For this reason, this research aimed to thematically synthesize the research papers on chemistry-focused socio scientific issues (SSI) from 2008 to 2020 and…

Between 2005 and 2015 a series of science, technology and innovation policies were deployed in Argentina among which academic research collaborations with industry was particularly fostered. This paper studies the effect of those policies on newer researchers, defined as those with PhD or postdoctoral scholarships, looking at their motivations to…

We outline an instructional strategy for supporting students' science literacy skills using a structured decision-making tool in an interdisciplinary undergraduate course. Instructional tools support basing complex socioscientific issues decisions on a reasoned analysis of tradeoffs among multiple conflicting values rather than heuristics, such as…