People use many different products made from plastics every day. But conventional plastics such as polyvinyl chloride (PVC) do not always have a good reputation in society at large. Bioplastics such as thermoplastic starch (TPS) promise to be better alternatives but are they really better than conventional plastics? This article presents a new…

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…

Constructing and critiquing scientific arguments has become an increasingly important goal for science education. Yet, the differences in the ways students construct collaborative oral and individual written socioscientific arguments are not well established. Our research with one middle school class in an urban New England school district…

We experimented with teaching nanotechnology in high school within the perspective of citizenship education in science by involving experts in nanotechnology, education, ethics and philosophy. After training, the students debated a Socially Acute Question (SAQ) that they elaborated during the various phases of instruction. The field of SAQs…

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…

Problem statement: Socioscientific issues-based learning activity is essential for scientific reasoning skills and it could be used for analyzing problems be applied to each situation for more successful and suitable. The purposes of this research aimed to compare learning achievement, analytical thinking and moral reasoning of seventh grade…

The study reports on an investigation of the impact of a Science-Technology-Society (STS) approach in promoting more positive student attitudes toward science that are recommended by current reform documents. A total of 609 students from grades six through nine were selected for a survey of attitudes in two class sections assigned as either…

The present study examined the outcomes of a newly designed four-lesson science module on opinion-forming in the context of genomics in upper secondary education. The lesson plan aims to foster 16-year-old students' opinion-forming skills in the context of genomics and to test the effect of the use of fiction in the module. The basic hypothesis…

In this study, American pre-service teachers' responses on Kimball's Nature of Science Survey (NOSS) were used as a basis for analyzing the sense of "the nature of science" held by a group of Nigerian pre-service science teachers. In comparing the responses it was apparent that the Nigerian students were much more inclined to see science…