Abstract
Our article proposes a set of six criteria for analysing science-technology-society-environment (STSE) issues in regular textbooks as to how they are expected to contribute to students’ scientific literacy. We chose genetics and gene technology as fields prolific in STSE issues. We derived our criteria (including 26 sub-criteria) from a literature review of the debate in science education on how to increase scientific literacy. We inspected the textbooks regarding the relationships between science, technology, society, and environment, and considered the presence of the decontextualized and socially neutral view of science as distorted view. We, qualitatively and quantitatively, applied our set of criteria to two German Biology textbooks and identified, in total, 718 STSE statements. Based on the frequencies of different criteria and sub-criteria in the textbooks, we drew conclusions concerning STSE issues and the underlying conceptions of science and technology, which might hinder the furtherance of scientific literacy. The applicability of our approach in other science education contexts is discussed.
Highlights
Scientific literacy (SL) has met with increased interest during the last decades, rooted mainly in two different arguments within science education: One argument arose from concerns about the decline of scientific and technological careers in Europe (e.g., Portugal, France, Germany, and The Netherlands: see [1])
We have argued for an integrated treatment of decontextualized and socially neutral view of science (DSNVS) and STSE issues [6] because this distorted view may represent an obstacle to a balanced approach of the relationships between science, technology, society and environment
Following our previous work [6], our general objective was to propose criteria for textbook analysis, in order to to enable the identification of weaknesses and strengths of science-technology-society-environment issues and to detect misconceptions of science and technology that might enable the identification of hinder a fair approach to these issues
Summary
Scientific literacy (SL) has met with increased interest during the last decades, rooted mainly in two different arguments within science education: One argument arose from concerns about the decline of scientific and technological careers in Europe (e.g., Portugal, France, Germany, and The Netherlands: see [1]). The European Commission [2] held school science education responsible for failing to attract students’ interest in scientific issues and put forth the challenge to innovate educational settings and adapt curriculum and practices, in order to make scientific and technological careers more popular [3]. Educators need to promote an understanding of the interactions between science and technology interactions and their influence in socio-cultural and environmental contexts. Science textbooks have been suggested as a means to convey the notion of “the social context of science” [10] (p. 249)
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