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In this article, we study third-year university students' reasoning about three controversial socio-scientific issues from the viewpoint of education for sustainable development: local issues (the reintroduction of bears in the Pyrenees in France, wolves in the Mercantour) and a global one (global warming). We used the theoretical frameworks of social representations and of socio-scientific reasoning. Students' reasoning varies according to the issues, in particular because of their emotional proximity with the issues and their socio-cultural origin. About this kind of issues, it seems pertinent to integrate into the operations of socio-scientific reasoning not only the consideration of values, but also the analysis of the modes of governance and the place given to politics.Résumé exécutif Dans ce travail, nous avons comparé le raisonnement d'étudiants en licence sur trois Questions Socio-Scientifiques controversées dans le cadre de l'Education au Développement Durable: deux questions locales (la réintroduction de l'ours dans les Pyrénées et la présence du loup dans le Mercantour) et une question globale (le réchauffement climatique). Nous nous sommes appuyés sur le cadre théorique des représentations sociales et du raisonnement socio-scientifique.Sadler, Barab & Scott (2006) ont introduit la notion de raisonnement socioscientifique. Ces auteurs ont élaboré de façon théorique le raisonnement socio-scientifique à partir de quatre opérations souhaitables dans l'analyse des QSS: (a) l'analyse de la complexité inhérente à la question étudiée, (b) l'examen de la question à partir de différents points de vue, (c) la perception que la question doit être soumise à des recherches complémentaires sur le plan scientifique mais aussi social et (d) l'expression de scepticisme vis-à-vis d'informations qui peuvent être biaisées.C'est à Moscovici (1961Moscovici ( , 1976 qu'on doit la réapparition du concept de représentation sociale. La représentation sociale est un processus à la charnière du social, de l'affectif et du cognitif qui forme un cadre interprétatif. C'est aussi un produit, car elle est constituée de croyances et d'opinions organisées autour d'une signification centrale et par rapport à un objet

ABSTRACT:Within the increasing body of research that examines students' reasoning on socioscientific issues, we consider in particular student reasoning concerning acute, open-ended questions that bring out the complexities and uncertainties embedded in illstructured problems. In this paper, we propose a socioscientific sustainability reasoning (S 3 R) model to analyze students' reasoning exchanges on environmental socially acute questions (ESAQs). The paper describes the development of an epistemological analysis of how sustainability perspectives can be integrated into socioscientific reasoning, which emphasizes the need for S 3 R to be both grounded in context and collective. We argue the complexity of ESAQs requires a consideration of multiple dimensions that form the basis of our S 3 R analysis model: problematization, interactions, knowledge, uncertainties, values, and governance. For each dimension, in the model we have identified indicators of four levels of complexity. We investigated the usefulness of the model in identifying improvements in reasoning that flow from cross-national web-based exchanges between groups of French and Australian students, concerning a local and a global ESAQ. The S 3 R model successfully captured the nature of reasoning about socioscientific sustainability issues, with the collective negotiation of multiple forms of knowledge as a key characteristic

Education for Sustainability has become an institutional requirement in many countries. It takes many forms that can integrate the teaching of environmental Socioscientific Issues (SSIs). In this context, we present the French notion of Socially Acute Questions (SAQs). We develop a theoretical frame to analyse educational configurations applied to the teaching of SAQs within the perspective of sustainability. This frame is built with a reference to a matrix integrating attributes of knowledge (universal, plural, engaged or contextualised), teachers' epistemological postures (scientism, utilitarianism, skepticsm or relativism) and various didactic strategies (doctrinal, problematizing, critical or pragmatic). To illustrate this frame, three situations of teaching-learning are compared.