Working with socio-scientific issues . Students’ and teachers’ experiences

• We present a research project aiming at investigating how teachers and students in lower secondary school experience work with socio-scientific issues (SSIs). Our interest concerns the importance the actual content has for the students‘ interest and learning and how students‘ gender and attitudes towards science, affect their experience. Another interest is how the teachers describe their work with the cases, the students‘ learning and what difficulties they encounter in the work. We have compared students‘ and teachers‘ experiences of the SSI work. Data have been collected by questionnaires with students and teachers and interviews with teachers. The teachers confirm results from this and other studies that students are interested in working with socio-scientific issues. However some of results are contradictory. The teachers felt safe with content and work forms but they still arranged SSI as something special and even if they were comfortable with group work they generally did not seem to know how to facilitate the students‘ work. Both students and teachers found the work interesting and the teachers but not the students judged that the students learnt as much science as usual. Both students and teachers perceived critical thinking, search for information, and ability in argumentation as learning outcomes that were developed during the work with the case.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Socio-scientific issues

secondary school

teachers

students

authentic cases

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kon (subject category)