Researchers agree that an interdisciplinary approach should be taken to address bioethical issues at school. Little is known about the knowledge students need to be able to understand and take part in discussions about these issues. We investigate the relationship between 79 students' prior knowledge in various domains and their ability to recall…

In this article, the argument is put forth that controversies about the scope and limits of science should be considered in Nature of Science (NOS) teaching. Reference disciplines for teaching NOS are disciplines, which reflect upon science, like philosophy of science, history of science, and sociology of science. The culture of these disciplines…

This article proposes introducing a strategy of controversy into human rights curriculum. First, it refers to the development of human rights education in Latin America and illustrates how controversy can be incorporated in the different disciplines of the curriculum. Second, the article shows how human rights from a controversial perspective can…

The scholarship of interdisciplinarity provides a potentially powerful response to anti-intellectual and anti-democratic impulses. It recognizes that proof and disproof are generally impossible, and that scientists can be biased in their evaluation of the evidence. Yet it proposes a set of strategies for transcending scholarly disputes in order to…

Purpose: Science education literature has indicated that teachers do not always feel comfortable teaching socioscientific issues (SSI) that are infused with several social domains. In order to address this problem in teaching SSI, this study is designed to understand and describe the experiences of a science teacher and a social studies teacher,…

Neuroscience continues to enjoy a renaissance of study and a range of responses, both in explorations of religious experience and in educational practice. Neuroscience, as an interdisciplinary field, attained a new ascendancy at the end of the 20th century, known as the decade of the brain. New insights continue to influence education and public…

In an eight-month interdisciplinary seminar at the University of Dayton (Ohio), professional faculty members determined that ethical and religious issues should form an integral part of their research and teaching. Seminar activities, texts used, main points of discussion, and types of questions and research generated by participants are…

The undergraduate course in agricultural ethics has been under development at Texas A&M University for four years. The course that has evolved is the result of discussion between the philosophy and agriculture departments. The course attempts to incorporate basic economic principles that affect agriculture as well as to tie these principles to…

The "ISSS Annual Conference Proceedings" is a peer-reviewed professional publication published once a year following the annual conference. (Individual papers contain references.) [For the 2011 proceedings, see ED518589.]

Provided are examples of science/society scenarios for biology, chemistry, and physics classes, as well as those of an interdisciplinary nature. These scenarios present some social or ethical problems related to the discipline and pose questions for student discussions. (Includes description of a project involved in developing/piloting such…

There is growing awareness of the need to equip students to think through the ethical implications of developments in biology. We describe an exercise in which students work in teams to produce websites about current controversial issues within the subject. Participants report a significant improvement in their knowledge of bioethics and…

A compilation of program ideas and related newspaper articles, cartoons, and visual aids, this booklet describes the objectives and procedure for the implementation of a pilot program at Frank W. Cox High School in Virginia Beach, Virginia, that emphasizes ethics education and the value of writing as a means to promote critical thinking. The first…

This document describes an elementary teacher education program (TEP) for training elementary school teachers to include the environment in the content and methods of the early years of education. The major focus of this document is to infuse environmental content and methods in existing or planned courses of instruction in the TEP. The topics in…