Abstract
The socioscientific issues framework has proven to have a significant impact over the last two decades on many areas related to the development of functional scientific literacy in students. In this article, we summarize and synthesize recent trends in socioscientific issues research that impact both disciplinary and interdisciplinary science education research. These trends represent science-in-context investigations that we propose are advanced by three broad and interrelated areas of research including: 1) Socioscientific Issues and the Central Role of Socioscientific Reasoning; 2) Socioscientific Issues and the Primacy of Socioscientific Perspective Taking; and, 3) Socioscientific Issues and the Importance of Informal and Place-Based Contexts. We discuss the most recent research in those areas and explore the educational significance these new trends.
Highlights
The role of Socioscientific Issues (SSI) has proven to be a major impetus in the promotion of scientific literacy within the science education community over the last two decades
The SSI movement has drawn from a wide swath of interrelated scholarship that uniquely positions it as a sociocultural progressive framework serving as a counterpoint to recent STEM initiatives as commonly conceived and practiced in academia
That sociocultural perspectives as those advocated in the SSI framework has to be at best, inferred and not explicitly addressed by initiatives such as A Framework for K-12 Science Education (National Research Council, 2012) or the Generation Science Standards (2013) in the US, suggests to us that other global initiatives not look to the US as the “Gold Standard” for progressive frameworks (Zeidler, 2014; Zeidler, 2016; Zeidler et al, 2016)
Summary
The role of Socioscientific Issues (SSI) has proven to be a major impetus in the promotion of scientific literacy within the science education community over the last two decades. Such initiatives seek to merge with approaches in the fields of place-based and informal science education (Gruenewald & Smith, 2008; Semken & Freeman, 2008; Sobel, 2004) and seek to leverage students’ sense of place and attachment to the real “others” (people and the environment) who incur impacts from SSI and their resolution in order to promote ecological and cultural sustainability (Herman, Sadler, et al, 2018).
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