Effects of socioscientific issues-based teaching on attitudes: Students’ resources as moderator

Abstract

Engagement with socioscientific issues (SSI) is seen as an important citizenship goal of SSI-based science education. In this experimental study, Dutch students (age 8 to 13) participated in lesson series in which they learned about and discussed SSI, such as issues related to the textile industry and wastewater. Attitudes toward SSI indicating engagement were measured among relatively large experimental (n = 236) and control (n = 192) groups prior to and after the intervention. Multilevel analyses showed a positive effect of SSI-based teaching on collective efficacy and no effects on the other seven attitude components. Furthermore, we investigated whether the effects depended on students’ SSI-related resources. Students’ profiles for use of sources of knowledge (USK) moderated the effect of condition on self-efficacy and—depending on analysis type—on personal relevance, positive feelings, and collective efficacy. The positive impact occurred mainly for students with low USK. We discuss implications thereof for SSI education.

Keywords:

• attitudes
• citizenship
• engagement
• socioscientific issues
• sources of knowledge

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Jory Tolkamp, Kim Evers, Lars Henning, Quiette Kats, dr. Alieke van Dijk, and dr. Erik van Schooten for their contributions to the research reported. We also thank all the schools, teachers, and students who participated in the “Working together towards scientific citizenship” project.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Data availability

Data and material are available upon request.

Notes

1 Topçu (2010) describes the dimension Anxiety towards SSI as “The extent to which students have concerns and worry about SSI” (p. 58). Similar to the scale Concern by Klaver and Walma van der Molen (2021), this could be indicative of engagement with SSI. However, the items by Topçu (e.g., “I think that social values suffer from the implementation of SSI”, p. 58) suggest that this scale measures more of a negative attitude toward SSI than being indicative of engagement with SSI.

2 These were two classes from a school that decided not to participate in the study after the pretest (n = 41 students), one class where the T1 measure was missing (n = 14), one class that joined the study at T2 (n = 17), students in the two Grade 6/7/8 combination classes who only participated at T1 or T3 (n = 51), and students in the other 18 classes who missed the measurement at T1 or T2 (n = 75).

3 The large amount of data gathered during this period as well as staff changes in our research group are the reasons for the delayed analysis and report. Delayed implementation of the first lesson series is the reason for the longer period of questionnaire administration at T1.

4 The validation study for the PASSI questionnaire not only included the students who were part of this study, but also included additional students to get a large enough sample to validate the questionnaire (Klaver & Walma van der Molen, 2021).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by TechYourFuture, center of expertise in technology education, under Grant P31 and Grant P93.