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In STEM learning focused on science literacy, socioscientific issues instruction is often proposed as a way to bolster students’ civic engagement, however few studies in science education have explicitly examined this connection. We define civic engagement as the work of influencing legitimately public matters using means within the existing political structure. In this work we investigate students’ feelings of self-efficacy for this type of civic engagement in the context of four socioscientific issues (prairie dog conservation, food insecurity, biofuels and water conservation). This study was in the context of a large enrollment introductory science college course, where students used a structured decision-making process to examine alternative policy solutions to complex socioscientific issues. We qualitatively examined students’ response about their perception of the importance of the issue, their self-efficacy in exploring actions they could take to impact the issue, and the effectiveness of those actions. We found that students’ ideas about impact and effectiveness varied across the four different issues contexts due to students’ sense of the issues’ importance and scale. Generally, students’ ideas about actions they could take to impact the issue were narrow and rarely included political actions like voting. We also found post instruction increases in students’ civic engagement attitudes and skills related to social justice, interpersonal and problem-solving skills and political awareness. Finally, we suggest that socioscientific instruction must have an explicit connection to policy-level decisions and reveal how individual actions can influence the societal system. Our course using a structured decision-making process in the context of socioscientific issues is one model to help students make these connections.
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Implementing an Environmental Contaminants Deliberation Module in General Chemistry
Placing chemistry in the context of complex societal issues is one way to help students see the application of fundamental ideas in the general chemistry curriculum. Here, we describe the impact of an in-class deliberation on environmental contaminants, which encourages students to consider different perspectives when addressing the issue of water and soil quality in communities. Student surveys were used to analyze the quality of the deliberation and several key factors regarding student attitudes before and after the activity. Students report a high-quality experience during the deliberation, wherein new ideas were introduced and they carefully considered different views on the issue at hand. Not only do students gain scientific knowledge about lead contamination, they also demonstrate statistically significant gains in their attitudes toward chemistry and their motivation to take action. As a complement to traditional teaching methods, this deliberation module can address key learning outcomes in systems thinking and the impact chemistry has on society.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2012931
- PAR ID:
- 10565440
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Chemical Education
- Volume:
- 101
- Issue:
- 8
- ISSN:
- 0021-9584
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 3564 to 3569
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.4c00273
