Review of Socio-scientific Issues (SSI) in Science Education

Abstract

This review synthesizes current conceptualizations and pedagogical approaches to Socio-scientific Issues (SSI) in science education, drawing on recent research and commentary. SSI are defined as complex societal challenges inherently linking scientific and social dimensions. The rationale for their inclusion in curricula centers on fostering scientific literacy, critical thinking, and citizenship education by engaging students with authentic, relevant, and often controversial real-world problems. This paper highlights key content areas, effective teaching methodologies, and distinguishes SSI from related educational movements like Science, Technology, and Society (STS). Furthermore, it identifies both common conceptual threads and areas of differential emphasis across various scholarly perspectives.

Introduction to Socioscientific Issues (SSI)

Socio-scientific Issues (SSI) represent a critical pedagogical innovation in formal education, particularly within STEM fields, aiming to enhance teaching and learning processes and outcomes. SSI are broadly defined as societal challenges that are both scientific and social in nature. These issues, such as climate change or water pollution, are characterized by their authenticity, their consequential nature for society, and their frequent presence in the news. The core intention behind using SSI in instruction is to engage students in meaningful, authentic, and relevant ways with science.

A fundamental aspect of SSI is their complex and contentious nature, requiring students to analyze the intricate and interdisciplinary systems within which these issues are embedded. This interdisciplinary requirement extends beyond connecting multiple scientific disciplines to include fields outside of science, such as governmental and economic systems. Without understanding the dynamic and interdependent nature of these systems, students cannot fully grasp how issues develop, their consequences, or potential resolutions.

Rationale and Purpose of SSI Instruction

The integration of SSI into science education serves multiple critical purposes:

• Enhancing Relevance and Engagement SSI make science content relevant to students’ lives and can trigger an emotional response, fostering engagement in the STEM learning process. They are recognized as real-world scenarios related to contemporary issues, bringing a sense of authenticity to the science classroom. The personal relevance of SSI helps capture students’ attention, as they tend to focus on what affects them directly.
• Fostering Scientific Literacy and Competence A primary goal of SSI instruction is to cultivate scientific literacy (SL) or competence. This is often conceptualized as “functional scientific literacy,” which goes beyond a technocratic view to integrate psychological, social, and emotive growth, factoring in character and moral development, and utilizing cultural, discourse, case-based, and Nature of Science (NoS) issues. SSI prompts young people to engage with “science in action,” evaluate information, make decisions on controversial issues, and participate in debates.
• Promoting Citizenship Education and Responsible Decision-Making SSI prepare students for active participation in societal decision-making processes related to STEM issues. This aligns with the concept of citizenship education. By presenting the humanistic face of scientific decisions and the moral/ethical issues involved, SSI contribute to education for citizenship. The aim is to foster a collective social conscience and instill reflective reasoning.
• Developing Critical Thinking and Moral Reasoning Engagement with SSI necessitates the development of critical thinking skills, including analysis, inference, explanation, evaluation, interpretation, and self-regulation. SSI units encourage students to be truth-seeking, open-minded, analytical, systematic, judicious, and confident in their reasoning. Furthermore, SSI provide unique opportunities to challenge students’ moral reasoning and develop moral sensitivity.

Content Dimensions of SSI

SSI instruction encompasses a rich array of content, extending beyond traditional scientific facts to include interdisciplinary knowledge and skills:

• Knowledge of Science: This involves the facts, products, laws, and theories that constitute the body of scientific knowledge. SSI can be associated with specific curricular content, such as life sciences, energy systems, or global climate change. Crucially, SSI often deal with scientific knowledge that is “in the making,” unclear, or unstable, such as nanotechnologies or stem cell research. For instance, understanding the Flint water crisis requires scientific ideas related to the structures and properties of matter, chemical reactions, natural resources, and ecosystem dynamics.
• Knowledge About Science (Nature of Science – NoS): NoS refers to meta-knowledge about how scientific activity is performed, including the epistemology of scientific knowledge and its development processes. SSI are a means to discuss and learn about the connection between science and society. Key NoS ideas emphasized include the affordances and limitations of science for issue resolution, recognizing that not all questions can be answered by science and that solutions involve human decisions influenced by ethics and values. SSI also highlight that society influences science, and science influences society, and the importance of understanding the cultural context of scientific issues.
• Social Sciences and Systems: To fully comprehend SSI, it is essential to study them through the lens of relevant social systems, such as governmental and economic systems. Discussions on these topics often illuminate issues of power and inequity in society, as non-dominant groups may be disproportionately affected by issues like water pollution due to less power in decision-making.
• Skills: SSI instruction strongly emphasizes the development of key skills. Argumentation is the most frequently mentioned, along with critical thinking. Other skills include socioscientific reasoning (SSR), informal reasoning, moral sensitivity, and communication skills. These are often categorized as Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS).

Teaching and Learning Methodologies for SSI

Implementing SSI effectively in the classroom involves specific pedagogical strategies and techniques:

• Pedagogical Strategies:
  • Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL): SSI are frequently linked to IBL scenarios, encouraging students to actively investigate and make sense of phenomena. Models like the Socioscientific Issues Teaching and Learning (SSI-TL) model and Socio-Scientific Inquiry-Based Learning (SSIBL) are adaptations of IBL for SSI.
  • Authenticity and Action: SSIBL emphasizes authenticity, framing content in scenarios relevant to students and calling for action. Students are taught to take action regarding the issue.
  • Systems Thinking Strategies: Explicit opportunities to make sense of systems should be included, such as defining system boundaries, developing system models, and creating causal maps.
• Pedagogical Techniques and Classroom Discourse:
  • Dilemmas: The SSI itself can be presented as a dilemma, a situation requiring a decision between alternatives, often with no optimal choice. These dilemmas should be attractive, authentic, and controversial, allowing for different viewpoints.
  • Group Discussions and Debates: These are crucial for engaging students with the issue. Sociomoral discourse, where students’ reasoning influences each other, helps enhance the quality of arguments by exposing varied viewpoints and fostering conflict resolution. Productive debate and argumentation require modeling and expecting tolerance, mutual respect, and sensitivity. Teachers may start with guided discussions before moving to debates for better control.
• Teacher and Student Roles:
  • The teacher’s role is to direct, prod, orchestrate, and facilitate learning, becoming secondary to the SSI itself, which provides the context for understanding content. Teachers must invest time to find diverse sources, including potentially unsound ones, to challenge students to assess validity. They guide discussions with various lines of questioning (e.g., epistemological, issue-specific, moral reasoning probes).
  • Students are central, engaging deeply with the issue, challenging their own belief systems, formulating new perspectives, negotiating, and resolving conflicts.

Distinction from Science, Technology, and Society (STS) Education

While SSI are considered a heir of the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) movement, the SSI framework is described as going “above and beyond” typical STS education. STS education emphasizes the interrelationships among science, technology, and society. However, the SSI framework differentiates itself by explicitly considering the ethical dimensions of science, the moral reasoning of the child, and the emotional development of the student. This broader scope means SSI subsumes what STS offers while integrating developmental and sociological research, acknowledging epistemological growth and character development.

A distinction is also made between “cold-type SSI education,” which is more traditional science teaching with some socio-contextualization, being monodisciplinary and focused on content, and “hot-type SSI,” which emphasizes transdisciplinarity and political citizenship. This suggests that a superficial treatment of social context, reminiscent of some STS approaches, differs from the deeper, morally implicative engagement characteristic of SSI.

Similarities and Differences in Conceptualization

The sources provide both a consistent foundational understanding of SSI and varying emphases that enrich its conceptualization.

Similarities:

• Core Definition: All sources agree that SSI are complex, real-world issues intertwined with both scientific and social dimensions, often controversial, and demand informed decision-making. They universally highlight the interdisciplinary nature of these issues.
• Purpose and Rationale: There is a shared consensus that SSI instruction aims to foster scientific literacy and prepare students for active engagement and decision-making in society. The importance of relevance, authenticity, and consequentiality to motivate student learning is a consistent theme.
• Content Integration: All sources stress the necessity of integrating scientific knowledge with social, ethical, economic, and political considerations. The explicit inclusion of the Nature of Science (NoS), including its limitations and societal interactions, is also a common and crucial element.
• Pedagogical Focus: The promotion of argumentation, discussion, and debate as central pedagogical strategies is consistently emphasized across the texts. The use of real-world phenomena or dilemmas as starting points for learning is also a shared approach. Inquiry-Based Learning is frequently identified as a suitable framework for SSI.

Differences in Emphasis/Perspective:

• Ewing & Sadler (2020) place a strong, explicit emphasis on systems thinking as an interdisciplinary approach to increase relevance and understanding of SSI. They detail how to define and analyze scientific and social systems, using the Flint water crisis as a prime example of both. Their commentary also highlights connections to engineering.
• Alcaraz-Dominguez & Barajas (2021) provide a comprehensive conceptualization of SSI derived from a systematic review of educational research, organizing findings according to curriculum dimensions: purpose, contents, and teaching/learning methodologies. Their work focuses on synthesizing how SSI are conceptualized in research, including distinctions between “knowledge of science” and “knowledge about science” and noting specific pedagogical models like SSI-TL and SSIBL. They also introduce Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI).
• Zeidler & Nichols (2009) deeply explore the theoretical underpinnings of SSI, with a significant focus on its moral and ethical dimensions and their role in character education and sociomoral discourse. They articulate a concept of “functional scientific literacy” that integrates cognitive, moral, and emotional development. Their work explicitly positions SSI as a robust framework that goes “above and beyond” STS by incorporating these developmental aspects.

These differences reflect the diverse theoretical lenses and research goals within the field of SSI education, collectively providing a multifaceted understanding of its implementation and benefits.

Conclusion

The body of research and commentary on Socio-scientific Issues underscores their pivotal role in contemporary science education. By addressing complex, authentic, and often controversial societal challenges that intersect science with social, ethical, economic, and political dimensions, SSI instruction empowers students to develop comprehensive scientific literacy, robust critical thinking skills, and a capacity for responsible citizenship. The emphasis on interdisciplinary systems thinking, explicit engagement with the Nature of Science, and the cultivation of moral reasoning through classroom discourse marks SSI as a powerful pedagogical approach, distinct from earlier movements like STS due to its deeper focus on student development and character formation. Continued research is vital to further refine SSI implementation across diverse educational contexts and to explore areas such as assessment, which remains underexplored.

References

Ewing, M., & Sadler, T. D. (2020). Commentary: Socio-scientific Issues Instruction: An interdisciplinary approach to increase relevance and systems thinking. The Science Teacher, 88(2), 18-21.

Alcaraz-Dominguez, S., & Barajas, M. (2021). Conceptualization of Socioscientific Issues in Educational Practice from a Review of Research in Science Education. International Journal of Social Sciences and Humanity, 11(2), 1-10.

Zeidler, D. L., & Nichols, B. H. (2009). Socioscientific Issues: Theory and Practice. Journal of Elementary Science Education, 21(2), 49-58.