A Survey Of Decision-making Skills Of Socio-scientific Issues For Pre-vocational Chemistry Theachers

With the rapid changing of technologies advancing the development of the society and humans' life,these technologies also bring a great number of controversial problems,challenges and threats,such as greenhouse effect,transgenosis food,organs transplanting,pesticide misusing,environmental safety and etc..Furthermore,they also challenge social ethics morality,environment,health and other norms and limitations.These controversial social problems,associated with technological development and application,are regarded as socio-scientific issues(SSI).Currently,scientific education is faced with how to tackle these problems and make proper decisions.The study will define decision-making on socio-scientific issues as social decision-making skills.Social decision-making skills has a great impact on the benefits of individuals and associations and even on the overall economic and social situation.Therefore,social decision-makingskills is universally acknowledged as one of the core abilities of people in 21st century.Chemistry,a subject that is central,practical and creative,plays a key role in improving humans' life,the development of the society,technological advancement and etc..However,over these years,due to our misuse,the subject of chemistry is cornered into a dilemma,notorious and unattractive.People always associate environmental pollution,chemical disasters,terroristic threats and etc.with chemistry,which makes people hold a bias against chemistry.The new standard on chemistry of senior high school curriculums points out that students should focus on chemistry-related hot issues and get the deep understanding of the relationships among chemistry,technology,society and environment.Besides,they should participate in decision-making activities on chemical problems.Social decision-making skills has become a hot issue and object of chemistry teaching.However,socio-scientific issues offers opportunities to students who need decision-making skills in the society.A pre-vocational chemistry teacher is a reserve power of those who are teachers on the front.His social decision-making power has a great effect on self-learning chemistry and even on his future teaching philosophy and teaching actions.Moreover,his power influences future chemistry classes and teaching practice.The study employs the method of questionnaire survey,takes 182 pre-vocational chemistry teachers from one normal universities in Zhejiang Province and uses open questions by myself and PTA tool for the purpose of making sense of the current situation of social decision-making skills of pre-vocational chemistry teachers and making an analysis of the difference among these pre-vocational teachers from various grades and different genders.The study suggests that the decision-making skills of pre-vocational chemistry teachers is at the level of lower average with indexes including decision-making patterns,reasoning patterns,reasoning levels.Beside,the effect various grades and different genders on decision-making skills is not pronounced.According to the survey,the study finds that it is necessary to establish courses on decision-making skills to improve the decision-making skills of pre-vocational teachers,such as SSI decision teaching,optimizing teaching contexts and topic background.Proper teaching tactics and various teaching types should be adapted to developing the decision-making skillsof pre-vocational chemistry teachers.