The influence of context: comparing high school students’ socioscientific reasoning by socioscientific topic

Scientific literacy reflects an understanding of science as it relates to use of science in real-world contexts. Socioscientific issues (SSIs) are real-world problems that are complex in their acknowledgement of social as well as scientific aspects of the problem and are well-suited to support scientific literacy objectives. Because of their potential local and personal relevance, some research suggests that characteristics of the SSIs themselves could dictate the sophistication of the socioscientific reasoning or SSR, individuals use when they think about SSIs. However, this notion has not been measured quantitatively by directly comparing levels of individual components of SSR employed for two different topics of SSI. Using repeated-measures MANCOVA, I compare high-school student reasoning sophistication levels on components SSR for two SSIs – one on an environmental and one on a genetics issue. This inquiry is important to inform teachers of how they may need to approach SSIs differently depending on the topic and in its suggestion that students need to be exposed to a variety of SSIs to fully develop transferable SSR skills. Results suggest that students do reason about the SSIs differently in some areas. Implications for teachers, teacher educators, and researchers are discussed.