Integrating Socio-Scientific Issues to Enhance the Bioethical Decision-Making Skills of High School Students

Abstract

Scientific literacy has been focused on the construction of students' knowledge to use appropriate and meaningful concepts, critically think, and make balanced, well-informed decisions relevant to their lives. This study presents the effects of integrating socio-scientific issues to enhance the bioethical decision-making skills of biology students. Using a quasi-experimental research design, results of the independent and related samples t-test on the pre-and posttest mean scores of 72 students significantly revealed that integrating socio-scientific issues in biology lessons are useful to enhance their bioethical decision-making skills. Moreover, as socio-scientific issues were integrated in their lessons, students' classroom interactions and argumentations improved significantly and enabled them to give a positive, more elaborate, and in-depth responses with a wider range of explanations.

Integrating Bioethics in Sciences’ curricula using values in science and socio-scientific issues

“…According to other authors integrating socio-scientific issues constitute an approach that enhance the bioethical decision-making of high school students (Gutierez 2015). The main objectives of this proposal is that students, at each level, from middle school to undergraduate studies, understand the most important controversies in bioethics and acquire tools to analyze, in the future, bioethical arguments.…”

“…SSI provide a real-world context for Bioethics discussions mainly by including biological advances and the relationship between science and society, which may help K-12 students to engage with the theme, and make decisions on the impact of science, as others described (Gutierez, 2015).…”

“…My proposal constitutes one version of inquiry-based learning using dilemmas, with ill-structured problems and open-ended questions. In a class based on dilemmas scientific argumentation is essential, however including bioethical questions in the classroom will develop other useful skills and prepare students to become citizens who make decisions, such as public policy decisions, for example the ones related with allocating public resources, using scientific data, from different sources, and multiple bioethical views (Gutierez 2015).…”

A Mixed Method Research Study on the Effectiveness of Socioscientific Issue-Based Instruction

“…Sosyobilimsel konular aracılığıyla öğretimi sağlamak üzere planlanmış öğrenme ortamları, öğrencilerin bu konulara ilişkin bilgileri ile ilişkili olduğu (Lewis ve Leach, 2006), bilimsel içerik bilgilerini ilerlettiği (Klosterman ve Sadler, 2010), bilimin doğası kapsamındaki çeşitli boyutları olumlu olarak etkilediği (Sadler, Chambers ve Zeidler, 2004), karar verme becerilerini geliştirdiği (Gutierez, 2015;Zo'bi, 2014), üst düzey düşünme becerilerinin gelişimini desteklemenin yanı sıra fen bilimlerine, olumlu tutum geliştirmelerini teşvik etmektedir (Sadler, 2009). Ayrıca bu konular, fen eğitiminin nihai amacı olarak belirtilen fen okuryazarlığının güçlendirilmesinin bir yolu olarak görülmektedir (Pouliot, 2008;Topçu, Muğaloğlu ve Güven, 2014).…”

The effect of recycling education on high school students conceptual understanding about ecology: A study on matter cycle

“…In quasi-experimental research designs, the sample size is usually kept small due to the research's characterisitics (Balim, 2013;Ilter, 2014;Gutierez, 2015). This research was carried out on 68 tenth grade students studying in two different classes of a high school in Izmir province.…”