An important distinction can be made between the science, technology, and society (STS) movement of past years and the domain of socioscientific issues (SSI). STS education as typically practiced does not seem embedded in a coherent developmental or sociological framework that explicitly considers the psychological and epistemological growth of the child, nor the development of character or virtue. In contrast, the SSI movement focuses on empowering students to consider how science-based issues reflect, in part, moral principles and elements of virtue that encompass their own lives, as well as the physical and social world around them. The focus of this paper is to describe a research-based framework of current research and practice that identifies factors associated with reasoning about socioscientific issues and provide a working model that illustrates theoretical and conceptual links among key psychological, sociological, and developmental factors central to SSI and science education.

ABSTRACT:The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between students' conceptions of the nature of science and their reactions to evidence that challenged their beliefs about socioscientific issues. This study involved 41 pairs of students representing "critical cases" of contrasting ethical viewpoints. These 82 students were identified from a larger sample of 248 students from 9th and 10th grade general science classes, 11th and 12th grade honors biology, honors science, and physics classes, and upper-level college preservice science education classes. Students responded to questions aimed at revealing their epistemological views of the nature of science and their belief convictions on a selected socioscientific issue. The smaller subset of students was selected based on varying degrees of belief convictions about the socioscientific issues and the selected students were then paired to discuss their reasoning related to the issue while being exposed to anomalous data and information from each other and in response to epistemological probes of an interviewer. Taxonomic categories of students' conceptions of the nature of science were derived from the researchers' analysis of student responses to interviews and questionnaires. In some instances, students' conceptions of the nature of science were reflected in their reasoning on a moral and ethical issue. This study stimulated students to reflect on their own beliefs and defend their opinions. The findings suggest that the reactions of students to anomalous socioscientific data are varied and complex, with notable differences in the reasoning processes of high school students compared to college students. A deeper understanding of how students reason about the moral and ethical context of controversial socioscientific issues will allow science educators to incorporate teaching strategies aimed at developing students' reasoning skills in these crucial areas.

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If I were to compress Dewey into a single sentence it would be as follows: "Live like an art object striving to become a work of art." In unpacking his essence I would have to locate, identify, and explain the existence, the functions, the interrelations, and the meanings of events and objects; the instrumental and the consummatory; evolution, experience, and communication; community and democracy; the historical necessities, no longer valid, of various dualisms; the relation of theory to practice; the centrality of education to our human being. Richard Bernstein's John Dewey Society Lecture, "The Varieties of Pluralism" under the same severe compression would emerge as "Keep the Faith. Phronesis realized is democratic pluralism. Act so as to connect." Unpacking Dewey is easier than unpacking Bernstein. All of Dewey is present, before us, as it were. But the Bernstein lecture is the Bernstein lecture-a piece of writing given strength and also partially undone by the conditions of its final cause. It is writing of a certain length, constructed to be presented as a public event, intended to inform, to instruct, to caution and advise, and to give strength to any flagging spirits among us. And this it did, and does, demonstrating enviable knowledge and masterful control of the history of pragmatism and the rise and fall of the hegemony of analytic philosophy, presenting valuable insights respecting the development of "wild pluralism," and offering a timely reminder of how metaphysics informs social thought...and much more. But I find myself torn by "Varieties of Pluralism," both attracted and disturbed by it. I want something more, something more speculatively audacious (see again Dewey's call for speculative audacity with which Bernstein concludes his lecture, p. 18) than phronesis, yet I am not sure there is something more. Within the limits imposed by the lecture there is not. I also find the lecture facing a large, ironic problem, one of