Many museums deal with socio-scientific issues--meaning topics with multiple perspectives and ongoing research, such as climate change, vaccinations, or livestock farming. As important and trusted sources of science education, museums can play a critical role in raising awareness about such issues. They tend to highlight the various perspectives…

The implementation of equity-oriented reforms is never simply a technical matter: it involves directly engaging with the norms and politics responsible for reproducing inequitable opportunities and outcomes, and with efforts to promote educational justice. To date, there has been little research on how leaders in science education navigate the…

Engagement with socioscientific issues (SSI) has emerged as an important focus for science education. SSI have been successfully used to teach science concepts, but they also serve a role in helping learners develop a capacity to engage with science in everyday life. Here we present an epistemic framework for characterizing socioscientific…

This article establishes a rational, feasible, and necessary conclusion to reform high school science content into an equitable experience for its wide diversity of students' self-identities. Research indicates that 85% of graduates would not normally have enrolled in any science course unless required. Their values are more aligned with their…

Scientific misinformation and disinformation, proliferating via the internet and social media, are now significant problems. Proposed solutions vary substantially. Here, I describe a set of prospective benchmarks--10 competencies--that seem essential for reorienting science education to address the challenge. They include, first, elements of…

This article offers a retrospective synopsis of 70 years of development of a humanistic approach to science education. Instruction using the history of science, for example, provides a rich context for students to learn not only canonical science content on a need-to-know basis, but also content from the other domains of humanistic science…

Both evolution and climate change have broad scientific consensus, and yet they are the most contested scientific concepts in the US K-12 education system. This study aimed to explore trends in proposed US state legislation employed from 2003 to 2023 by anti-evolution and anti-climate change education movements to constrain the teaching of these…

This paper presents the argument that climate change should be taught in schools as a sociopolitical and scientific process, and that students should be able to use their science knowledge to think critically about climate change as a social justice issue. A necessary and achievable outcome of science education is critical climate awareness--an…

Certain science-related topics elicit persistent public controversy, such as routine childhood vaccinations and anthropogenic climate change. Many people are misinformed about the scientific facts underlying these issues. In response, science educators have called for improvements in the public's science literacy, but it is not clear which…

The political nature of socioscientific controversies becomes starkly apparent in countries of the Global South where science and technology are embedded in societies characterized by pervasive structural inequalities which, in part, were created by the Global North. This article presents empirical work from the standpoint of a critical science…

The aim of this study was to determine how a learning and teaching experience, which related to socioscientific argumentation and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), changed elementary teachers' views of teaching with socioscientific argumentation, as well as the change in their PCK and instructional practices. Five teachers studying for the…

This investigation examined how a 6 week environmental topics course that included place-based socioscientific issues (SSI) instruction in the Greater Yellowstone Area (GYA) in the United States of America influenced 21 postsecondary students' expressed socioscientific orientations of "Ecological Worldviews" (including…

In this study, the purpose is to develop and illustrate a method that facilitates investigations of students' learning processes in classroom discussions about socioscientific issues. The method, called transactional argumentation analysis, combines a transactional perspective on meaning making based on John Dewey's pragmatic philosophy and an…

This paper presents a normative pragmatics analysis of students' use of science content in eight socioscientific group discussions about human gene therapy. The specific focus of the paper is on the argumentative role that invocations of science had in the dialectics of the discussions. The analysis suggests that science content occasionally…

It has been 40 years since science, technology, society, and environment (STSE) education first appeared in science education research and practice. Although supported among many educators worldwide, there is much confusion surrounding the STSE slogan. Widely differing discourses on STSE education and diverse ways of practicing, have led to an…