School-industry collaboration can be an effective way to implement STSE issues to teaching. However, teachers' negative beliefs, lack of knowledge, resources, support and opportunities to collaborate with companies can impede the efficient implementation. In this case-study, 42 Finnish and Slovenian pre-service teachers' STSE beliefs were first…

Problem-Based Learning (PBL) modules based on the topic of socio-scientific issues are behaved to be effective to improve argumentation skills. This aim of the research was to look at the effectiveness of PBL modules on the topic of socio-scientific issues, in order to empower argumentation skills for students with high and low achievements.…

Historically, societies have relied on universities and colleges to provide a space for young citizens to experiment with and explore the innovative approaches needed to address contemporary problems. Yet today, many universities serve as diploma mills that succeed in getting students onto the job market, but fail to give those students tools for…

Socio-scientific inquiry-based learning (SSIBL) engages learners with local and global issues in which science and technology are interwoven, aiming to empower them to become active agents of change for their local communities. Within the PARRISE project, we worked with pre-service teachers on prioritising an "it matters" approach to…

Conventional school science has often portrayed obesity as a self-inflicted problem. It tends to ignore perspectives at the systems level, such as social, political, marketing and economic factors that shape an obesogenic environment that determines individual eating and lifestyle patterns. Therefore, socioscientific decisions (e.g. fat tax) are…

Despite efforts to increase teaching of biotechnology worldwide, there are concerns that public literacy of genetic technologies remains insufficient. Improved education strategies are expected to empower individuals to make informed decisions about biotechnology. To evaluate the teaching and learning of this complex topic, qualitative assessment…

Preparing students to achieve the lofty goal of functional scientific literacy entails addressing the normative and non-normative facets of socioscientific issues (SSI) such as scientific processes, the nature of science (NOS) and diverse sociocultural perspectives. SSI instructional approaches have demonstrated some efficacy for promoting…

As every elementary science teacher knows, children sometimes ask questions that can not easily be answered by science. The "messiness" of these questions may stem from the fact that scientific understanding is often incomplete and ever changing, a situation that can lead students (and the public) to be confused about the information…

We explore the integration of societal issues in undergraduate training within the life sciences. Skills in thinking about science, scientific knowledge production and the place of science in society are crucial in the context of the idea of responsible research and innovation. This idea became institutionalized and it is currently well-present in…

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices are a hallmark of high-impact pedagogy. Such practices are common in discussions regarding the retention of all students in STEM, but especially those with identities such as Black, Indigenous, persons of color, female, and LGBTQIA+. However, the extent to which DEI-framed content improves alignment…

Many scholars and science curricula from around the world describe socioscientific issues (SSIs) as meaningful contexts for teaching about the nature of science (NOS). These calls are guided by the assumption that science teachers are able to identify relevant aspects of the NOS in a given SSI and to decide how to utilize these for NOS…

In the nonmajor science classroom, case studies--when used as learning tools--should help students build the necessary framework to understand the nature of science. For most students, the nonmajor science course (in this case, Astronomy 101) may be the last time that they interact with science in a formal learning setting. A National Science…

Socio-scientific teaching and learning (SSI-TL) has been suggested as an effective approach for supporting meaningful learning in school contexts; however, limited tools exist to support the work of designing and implementing this approach. In this paper, we draw from a series of four design based research projects that have produced SSI…

Carbon cycling is a key natural system that requires robust science literacy to understand how and why climate change is occurring. Studies show that students tend to compartmentalize carbon movement within plants and animals and are challenged to make sense of how carbon cycles on a global scale. Studies also show that students hold faulty models…

The aim of this study was to explore how the design of this chemistry lesson for citizenship influences students' use of different perspectives in decision-making about 'the use and sale of laughing gas'. In this study, 'the use and sale of laughing gas among youth' was chosen as a socio-scientific issue. This chemistry lesson for citizenship was…