This study combines the fields of science communication and science education. It focuses on the ways the media covered the wild boars' invasion into the city of Haifa in Israel, their hazards and the policy of the city. We identified the problem as a socio-scientific issue (SSI) according to science education literature, and investigated the…

Controversial scientific issues, or socioscientific issues (SSIs), demand the consideration of more than scientific content when constructing decisions. The Justification for Knowing framework (JFK) was developed to categorize the information sources drawn upon when making SSI decisions within the academic domain of natural sciences. These…

The climate crisis is a growing concern for many people, especially those who are of college age, making it an important and pressing issue to explore in honors courses. Eco-Art: Using Art to Reconcile with the Climate Crisis, a University of New Mexico (UNM) Honors College course, integrates the disciplines of art and environmental justice to…

The main purpose of this study is to examine the epistemological beliefs and informal reasoning of science and social studies teachers about COVID-19, which is a controversial socioscientific issue. Qualitative research, specifically phenomenological design, was used in the study. During the data collection process, teachers' epistemological…

Both evolution and climate change have broad scientific consensus, and yet they are the most contested scientific concepts in the US K-12 education system. This study aimed to explore trends in proposed US state legislation employed from 2003 to 2023 by anti-evolution and anti-climate change education movements to constrain the teaching of these…

Socioscientific issues (SSIs), or controversial scientific issues with social implications, influence members of society regardless of demographic. SSIs are contentious and ill-structured, meaning they do not have a definitive answer. To properly equip students with the tools needed to handle SSIs, undergraduate science curricula emphasize…

Traditional biology curricula depict science as an objective field, overlooking the important influence that human values and biases have on what is studied and who can be a scientist. We can work to address this shortcoming by incorporating "ideological awareness" into the curriculum, which is an understanding of biases, stereotypes,…

The purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between high school students' understandings of aspects about nature of science (NOS) and their argumentation skills, particularly whether informed conceptions of NOS contribute to better argumentation skills. Participants, a total of 125 Grade 10 students, responded to an open-ended…

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…

This study investigates whether university students' epistemic beliefs and prior knowledge about controversial socioscientific issues (SSIs) can predict the different types of arguments that students construct. Two hundred forty-three university students were asked to construct different types of supportive arguments--social, ethical, economic,…

Many scholars suggest that recent major science education initiatives apparently tied to intense economic competitiveness and growth have prioritized education about "products" (e.g., laws, theories, innovations) and skills (e.g., experimentation) of fields of science and technology. Such initiatives also, apparently, tend to avoid…

This dissertation undertakes the question, "what are the implications of engaging climate crisis in social studies education?" Employing the theoretical notion of difficult knowledge (Britzman, 1998; Pitt & Britzman, 2003), the analysis of data attends to the multitude of challenges teachers face as they grapple with the content of…

During the unprecedented and rapid spread of the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) around the World, students have been concerned about the disease as much as the rest of the global community. As a real-world problem, the COVID-19 pandemic with many different debatable facets has social and scientific components, impacts society, and shows…

This qualitative study examines the pedagogical potential that a Cartography of Controversy (CoC) approach has in enabling secondary school students to unravel the complexity of socioscientific issues and to communicate about them. The aim was to examine the types of knowledge and the ways in which students approached uncertainty when asked to…

In this study, it is aimed to determine the metaphorical perceptions of prospective science, social studies and classroom teachers towards socioscientific issues. The study was carried out with third and fourth class prospective science (f: 41), classroom (f: 129), and social studies (f: 73) teachers of the faculty of education at a state…