Background Despite increasing awareness of the importance of promoting the social responsibility of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professionals, few intervention programs have been developed to enhance the social responsibility of college students or adults in the STEM fields. In this paper, we introduced a new instructional program, called ENACT (engage, navigate, anticipate, conduct, and take action) and examined whether the program increased the social responsibility among safety engineering students (N = 46) recruited from a university located in a southern metropolitan area of South Korea. Results In the ENACT program, the college students selected and explored socioscientific issues (SSIs) of their own interest then autonomously engaged in scientific and engineering group projects spanning a semester where they developed solutions to the SSIs and shared them with their communities. At the conclusion of the intervention in this study, they displayed an increased social responsibility regarding the consideration of societal needs and demands, civic engagement and services, and participation in policy decision-making. Social responsibility scores measured after the intervention (post-test) correlated with students' willingness to voluntarily participate in projects involving SSIs. In addition, the intervention effects were more pronounced for the students who initially had medium and low social responsibility scores. Conclusions We have shown that social responsibility can be nurtured by systemic instructional approaches, and increased social responsibility can lead to greater commitment to resolving SSIs. Mastering engineering content knowledge and skills is the key element of engineering curricula. However, we are compelled to incorporate social responsibility into the STEM curriculum. We believe that the ENACT model contributes toward this end.
To effectively address socioscientific issues (SSI), science teachers need to obtain a certain level of pedagogical content knowledge for SSI teaching (SSI-PCK). In this study, therefore, pre-service science teachers (PSTs) were provided an SSI teacher education program (SSI-TEP) based on the SSI-PCK framework and their development and challenges were carefully examined. Fifteen PSTs participated in the SSI-TEP over 15 weeks and had opportunities to design and implement an SSI lesson in a group. Data were collected through SSI lesson plans, fieldnotes, and group interviews. The results showed that the PSTs highly valued their SSI-TEP experience but noted several pedagogical and epistemological challenges. They were concerned about how to meet both the national science curriculum and students’ needs and how to reveal the nature of science and technology through the selected SSI scenarios. Additionally, they felt the need to obtain skills to facilitate and scaffold students’ participation. The challenges were often intertwined with SSI-PCK components.
This study aimed to investigate the effects of the ENACT model on promoting Indonesian college students’ views of social responsibility of scientists and engineers. The ENACT model emphasized the students’ epistemological understanding of science and technology using socio-scientific issue (SSI) approaches to enhance the social responsibility, and their science/engineering practices and experiences of taking action to resolve the issues. A total of 80 college students enrolled in a chemistry course in a university in Indonesia participated in the study, 40 of which majored in chemistry education, and the other 40 majored in chemical engineering. An instructor taught and implemented the ENACT project over 10 weeks as a part of the course. Data was collected by a questionnaire called “views of social responsibility of scientists and engineers (VSRoSE)” to explore the changes in students’ views on social responsibility. The participating students responded to the questionnaire before and after the intervention. In results, the effects of the ENACT project were notable in the chemical engineering (ENG) group. The chemistry education (EDU) group scored much higher than the ENG group in all the eight factors of VSRoSE in the pre-test. However, the score patterns changed after the intervention. The EDU group still exhibited high scores, but not much changed. The ENG group scores significantly increased in five factors and have presented similar score patterns with the ones of the EDU group.
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