| In 2002, the State Council put forward in Outline of National Action Scheme of Scientific Literacy for All Chinese Citizens the Goal 2019, which states that by the year 2049, all Chinese citizens over 18 shall live up to a certain scientific literacy standard. According to the Goal, all citizens shall have a basic understanding of scientific knowledge, and are able to deal with daily affairs based on appropriate scientific attitude and via scientific methods. It is required by the scientific education in China that the scientific literacy of the students be raised urgently. SSIs, like transgenic food, cloning and the usage of nuclear power, keep springing up these days. SSIs involve such areas as social culture, environment, economy, science, ethics and politics, etc. Including these issues in the teaching of scientific education will not only facilitate the understanding of scientific knowledge on the students' part and help them develop the right attitude on science, but also raise their awareness of tackling daily issues via scientific methods.SSIs are controversial, structure-less and involve a wide range of areas. All these features determine that SSIs, when used in the discussion on a scientific education class, have an obvious effect on developing the scientific literacy of the students. Therefore, this research aims to study the effect on the circumstance that SSIs are applied to scientific education teaching in colleges.This thesis adopts the method of literature research when studying the application of SSIs to the teaching of scientific education both home and abroad. We now have a basic knowledge of the categories and features of SSIs and their influence on the teaching. In the part of case study, the researcher chooses the students of Grade 2014 in Nanchang Normal University as the research object and sets up the experiment group and the control group. Quantitative data analysis and qualitative data analysis are adopted in the research. The former are applied to calculating the students' grades based on the questionnaire Test on the Scientific Literacy of College Student. Spss19 is used to analyze the difference between the experiment group and control group before and after the scientific education; the latter are applied to analyzing the teaching feedback and interview outline obtained from the experiment group.Results show that, before the teaching, the experiment group and control group have little difference in their scientific literacy, with both being at a relatively low level. After The teaching, there appears a significant difference between the experiment group and control group, with an obvious enhancement in scientific literacy of the former generally. However, due to a short period of the teaching and irrelevant invariables, there is no major difference between the two groups in mastering the scientific knowledge. After analyzing the teaching feedback and interviews, a majority of students show interest in the discussion teaching style. Most students think that this kind of teaching will facilitate their speaking and bold thinking, help them obtain a further understanding of the nature of science, and help them develop scientific methods in handling issues. The awareness of critical thinking and informal reasoning abilities are thus enhanced. Moreover, the research found that, the application of SSIs to teaching shows insufficiency, due to its openness and multidimensional property. This kind of teaching requires a high level of expertise and quality on the teachers' part. In the discussion, the issue of classroom order constantly arises. Lack of experience on the teachers' part leads to excessive amount of time spent on maintaining the classroom order. Besides, prompt and practicable assessment standard is also needed during the discussion.There exists insufficiency in this research due to the limit of time and space, and the short teaching period. The research results remain to be proved through further study. |
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