ABSTRACT
Socioscientific issues (SSI) has proven to be a viable educational framework in recent years. References to SSI can be found in the literature as far back as the 1980s (e.g., Fleming, 1986a; 1986b), and certainly several seminal figures in the field of science education have advocated the importance of connecting science to matters of social importance, as some advocates of the science-technology-society (STS) movement did for many years before that (Aikenhead, 1980; Fensham, 1983; Gaskell, 1982; Orp-wood & Roberts, 1980). However, in recent years, SSI has emerged as an educational construct influenced by ideologies embedded in the STS tradition but informed by theory and scholarship from philosophical, developmental, and sociological traditions that mark it off as distinct. My colleagues and I have been critical (perhaps to a fault) of STS (Sadler, 2004d; Zeidler & Keefer, 2003; Zeidler & Nichols, 2009; Zeidler, Sadler, Simmons, & Howes, 2005), likening it to an ideology in search of a theory. In contrast, we have offered a flexible framework that draws on bodies of scholarship that include but are not limited to cognitive and moral development, emotive reasoning, character education, sociomoral discourse, and the nature of science that situate SSI in a sociocultural perspective. Hence, while we offer an alternative ideology, ours is grounded in empirical research drawn from complementary fields. We have suggested “entry points” into science curricula that are of pedagogical importance to the larger science education community of researchers and practitioners that focus on nature of science issues, cultural issues, discourse issues and case-based issues as a means to developing a functional perspective of scientific literacy (SL). Such broad entry points in the SSI curriculum allow for the cultivation of scientific literacy by promoting the exercise of informal reasoning in which students are compelled to analyze, evaluate, discuss, and argue varied perspectives on complex issues that are ill structured but, precisely because they are context dependent, are fundamentally important to the quality of life in social and natural spheres (Kolstø, 2001a; Kuhn, 1993; Sadler, 2004a, 2004b; Zeidler 1984; Zeidler & Schafer, 1984).
