The Study Of Teaching Socioscientific Issues In Junior Middle School

Modern science and technology make the life more and more convient, at the same time,they have huge impact on human's survival.The controversial issues emerge in endlessly.Such as cloning, genetically modified foods and so on.There are two ascepts to casue these issues,the one is the technology, the other is people,becsuse they have different backgrounds,experience,morality and values,so when they are confront with the same issue,they will have different attitudes and views,and then make different decisions.Based on those reasons, controversial issues emerge.The issues which encompass social dilmmas with conceptual or technological links to science call "socioscientific issues","SSI" for short,and there are "SSI Instrucaion".During the learning of SSI,when they face with the ill-structured,controversial, complicated issues, students will use informal reasoning based on their scientific knowledge, experience and morality to analysis the issues,and then make decision. Socioscientific issues have become more and more important in science education because they occupy a central tole in the promotion of scientific literacy, and understanding of the nature of science,the ability of informal reasoning.There are abundant of researches abroad and overseas,unfortunately,we have never study on this topic by now.The students from one of the junior middle schools in jinhua participate in this research.We take the "mudflows" for example to teach socioscientific issues.The course span is 4 periods,160 minutes in all.This study explores the follow question:(1)Whether students'knowledge about mudflows have improves after the teaching of socioscientific issues? (2) Whether students will form the scientific concepts releated to the issue?(3) Facing with the issues of land development,what patters of informal reasoning they will present?(4) Whether the students'ability of informal reasoning will improve after the teaching of socioscientific issues?(5) What's the relationship between academic achievement and the ability of informal reasoning?(6)What's the students'attitude to the learning of socioscientific issues?The results are:(1)Students'knowledge about mudflows had improved significantly.(2)Students'knowledge of scientific concepts related to the issue became much more comprehensively.(3)Students tended to the socio-oriented pattern,then the ecological-oriented pattern,the last one is the science/technology-oriented pattern.(4)Students'ability of informal reasoning about the land development issue had improved, they were able to consider the issue much more specifically, reasonablely,comprehensively.(5)The relationship between scientific achievements was significantly,but the rusults showed that the relationship between chinese achievements was unsignificantly.(6)Students were interested in studying other socioscientific issuesThese results shows that we also can carry on those instruction mainland,and it also highlight the need to infuse socioscientific issues into science classroom.