Pre-Service Teachers’ Attitudes Toward Socio-Scientific Issues and Their Views About Nuclear Power Plants

Abstract

There is not a common attitude in a society for socio-scientific issues (SSI) such as whether to use nuclear power plants for energy production. Within this respect, the aim of the research is to examine pre-service science teachers’ and pre-service social studies teachers’ attitudes toward SSI and to reveal their views about setting up nuclear power plants in their country. The participant of research is 120 pre-service teachers. Firstly, Attitudes toward Socio-scientific Issues Scale (ATSIS) was implemented and then, focus group discussions were done with five students from each department separately so as to understand their views about nuclear power plants. Findings revealed that whereas pre-service teachers are eager to learn more about SSI, they have anxiety about it due to religion, moral and ethical perspectives. In addition, whereas both groups of pre-service teachers have some common views about nuclear power plants, pre-service science teachers do not have more positive views about having nuclear power plants in their country. Key words: attitude towards socio-scientific issues, focus group discussion, pre-service teachers, nuclear energy.

Modeling the Relationship between Preservice Elementary Teachers’ Scientific Habits of Mind, Attitudes towards Socio-scientific Issues and Scientific Literacy

“…There are two points in the research model for the assumptions that attitudes towards SSI and scientific literacy variables are related. As stated in the relevant literature, the relationship between attitudes towards SSI and scientific literacy (Emery et al, 2017;Kapici & Ilhan, 2016;Topcu, 2010;Zeidler et al, 2005) is related to the relationship between SHOMS for SSI and scientific literacy (Çalik & Coll, 2012;Gauld, 2005;Yacoubian & Khishfe, 2018). This argument is also in line with the view that scientific literacy level is about people's getting into the SHOMS for SSI.…”

“…The study also found that attitudes towards SSI affect the interest in scientific knowledge and publications positively. Kapici & Ilhan (2016) reports in their research that pre-service elementary teachers are willing to learn new developments involving SSI because they think they are related to daily life problems. Yerdelen et al (2018) state that pre-service elementary teachers' attitudes towards SSI are generally positive.…”

“…In recent studies carried on SSI, pre-service science teachers are generally preferred as a group of participants (Borgerding & Dagistan, 2018;Kapici & Ilhan, 2016;Topcu, Sadler, & Yilmaz-Tuzun, 2010;Topcu, Yilmaz-Tuzun, & Sadler, 2011), and the effect of SSI-based instruction on the quality of argumentation (Atabey & Topcu, 2017) or the relations of SSI with cognition skills (Alkış Küçükaydın, 2019, 2020) are tried to be revealed. Moreover, pre-service teachers' cases on moral or informal reasoning about SSI (Emery et al, 2017;Lee, Chang, Choi, Kim, & Zeidler, 2012;Sadler, 2004) and the relationship between SSI and critical thinking skills (Yacoubian & Khishfe, 2018) are discussed.…”