The role of socioscientific issues in biology teaching: from the perspective of teachers

ABSTRACT

Previous research has documented that students who engage with socioscientific issues can acquire some of the complex competences and skills typically related to scientific literacy. But an emerging field of research on science teachers’ understanding and use of socioscientific issues, has documented that a range of challenges hinders the uptake of socioscientific issues. In this study, we investigated the interpretation and implementation of socioscientific issues among Danish biology teachers. We conducted five in-depth group interviews and validated the emergent themes from the teachers’ talk-in-interaction by distributing a questionnaire. Our findings suggest that the participating teachers generally harbour a content-centred interpretation of socioscientific issues which manifests itself in at least three separate ways. First, the teachers generally use socioscientific issues as a vehicle to teach factual biological content. Second, the teachers emphasised mastery of factual content in their assessment. Third, the teachers tended to reduce socioscientific issues to specific biological contents in a way may preclude students from engaging with the real socioscientific issue. Our findings are particularly significant for science educators, policy-makers and curriculum designers, as we argue that key aspects of this content-centred interpretation may be a coping strategy used to navigate a divided curriculum.

KEYWORDS:

• Biology education
• assessment
• curriculum

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the constructive feedback from the two anonymous reviewers; we feel that their comments have enabled us to improve this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Sofie Tidemand http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0471-9277

Jan Alexis Nielsen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2596-4880

Notes

1. A number of national curricular conspicuously reflect socioscientific themes – for example, Homer and Ryder (2014) recently found a strong emphasis on socioscientific issues in GSCE science course in England and Wales; and Eijkelhof and Kapteijn (2000) described how the curriculum in the Netherlands since the late 1990’s focused on teaching science with a focus on e.g. the “socio-economic context” (p. 190).