tandfonline.com – Embracing socioscientific issues-based teaching and decision-making in teacher professional development

ABSTRACT

In recent decades, socioscientific issues (SSI) have been emerging from the interrelationship between science, technology, and society. For example, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, related decisions, like whether we need to ask people to use facemasks, is an SSI question being discussed internationally with no right or wrong answer. Controversial issues like SSI and the ability to make informed decisions need to be taught in school, which raises the question of whether teachers themselves are equipped with the skills required to make decisions on SSI. This study aimed to explore whether primary science pre-service teachers could consider multiple subject areas while making decisions on SSI in the context of abortion. Forty-two pre-service primary science teachers (third-year university students) in a genetics and biotechnology course participated in the study. The participants were asked to make decisions about abortion in three genetics-related scenarios and to explain their reasons in written reports. The SEE-SEP (science, environment, ethics/morality, sociology/culture, economy, and policy) model was adopted to explore the reasons behind the pre-service teachers’ decisions. The results showed that their decisions were influenced mainly by science and ethics/morality subject areas. The results further revealed that the participants who supported abortion based their decisions on both scientific evidence and their emotional responses. On the other hand, the pre-service teachers who were against abortion based their decisions on scientific evidence and the aspect of uncertainty. Accordingly, our study recognises the importance of including both science and ethics/morality discussions in SSI-based teaching. The implications for SSI-based teaching and learning are discussed.