One of the efforts to improve the quality of education in Indonesia is through learning by integrating environmental culture. Environmental culture can be packaged in more meaningful learning through biological literacy. This study aims to assess the biological literacy skills of high school students using local potential-based biodiversity…

Nature of science (NOS) has been a target of interest for decades. The main goal of this study is to explore the impact of the science, technology, society, environment (STSE) approach on students' understanding of NOS, taking "Galileo's study of free-fall motion" as an example. Participants in this study were 350 students of grade 10…

Socioscientific-issues based instruction can promote science to students as a tool for necessary learning in the disruptive world. This instruction helps students critique and response as its nature of science, gaining higher-ordered thinking, and discussing with scientific reasoning. The objectives of this study were to compare learning…

Students' argumentation skills are considered a central tool to contribute to scientific controversies in the science classroom. Scientific controversies of social relevance (socioscientific issues; SSI) are subject to multiple viewpoints that are often rooted in diverse disciplines. However, the relationship between issue familiarity and…

Over the past several decades it has become increasingly important to understand nature of science (NOS) for scientific literacy in science education. Science education researchers have suggested using socio-scientific issues to create a context for that purpose. The present fast-moving coronavirus or COVID-19 pandemic as a socio-scientific issue…

Scientific argumentation skills are important for students for expressing their opinions, making decisions and solving problems in daily life. Previous studies have focused on students' scientific argumentation skills, but few studies have proposed an instructional model for specifically developing these skills by creating a supportive classroom…

This study aims to examine the effect of Science-Technology-Society (STS) learning unit on the Work and Energy topic in developing grade 10 students' scientific argumentation. The research participants were 20 grade 10 students at one secondary school located in Khon Kaen province, the Northeastern region of Thailand. The students' tasks,…

This study investigates how affective dispositions influencing students' moral judgments can both shape their response to individual enjoyment from learning ethics (IE-LE) and predict their individual enjoyment from learning socio-scientific issues (IE-LSSI). Tenth-grade participants from southern Taiwan (n = 770) responded to survey items that…

As COVID-19 accelerated through spring of 2020 the question became how will schools cope with protracted closure? Devising strategies to engage and educate students through full-time, online learning became a priority. At Tufts CSE we specialize in creating high school biomedical science curricula that foster engagement with science and build…

In this design case, we describe our work to design and develop a socio-scientific issue (SSI) based unit of instruction for use in high school biology. Our team includes university based science educators, an experienced classroom teacher, and a microbiologist. The unit focuses on antibiotic resistant bacteria as a context for student exploration…

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…

This dissertation study is a conglomerate of the fields of Science Education and Applied Cognitive Psychology. The goal of this study is to determine what organizational features and knowledge representation patterns high school students exhibit over time for issues pertinent to science and society. Participants are thirteen tenth grade students…

The purpose of this study was to (a) investigate the effectiveness of explicit nature of science (NOS) instruction in the context of controversial socioscientific issues and (b) explore whether the transfer of acquired NOS understandings, which were explicitly taught in the context of one socioscientific context, into other similar contexts…

Sustainable management of marine resources raises great challenges. Working with this socio-scientific issue in the classroom requires students to apply complex models about energy flow and trophic pyramids in order to understand that food chains represent transfer of energy, to construct meanings for sustainable resources management through…

This study investigated the connection between the use of video cases within a multimedia learning environment and students' inquiry into a socio-scientific problem. The software program was designed based on principles from the Cognitive Flexibility Theory (CFT) and incorporated video cases of experts with differing perspectives. Seventy-nine…