Do your students engage with socioscientific issues? Socioscientific capital in civic science education

This dissertation aims to strengthen socioscientific issues (SSI) education by focusing on the resources available to students. SSI education is a type of science and citizenship education that supports students’ informed and critical engagement with social issues that have scientific or technological dimensions. This dissertation explores students’ SSI-related resources relevant to their engagement with SSI, such as their attitudes and social resources.
SSI education and students’ resources are two separate fields of research that are rarely bridged. In addition, a comprehensive overview of the resources that students bring to learning and decision-making about SSI has not been previously provided. Lida Klaver combines literature on SSI education with studies on students’ resources to introduce the concept of socioscientific capital, emphasizing the importance of considering students’ resources in SSI-based teaching.
To enable researchers to study and account for students’ SSI-related resources, and to help teachers to get to know their students’ resources, this dissertation includes the development and validation of two questionnaires: the Pupils’ Attitudes towards Socioscientific Issues (PASSI) questionnaire and the Use of Sources of Knowledge (USK) questionnaire. These questionnaires were used to get insight into student differences regarding engagement with SSI, resulting in differing patterns of students’ USK that were shown to be related to their attitudes.
The final study builds upon the arguments and findings of the first three studies. This study is an exploration of the effects of SSI-based teaching on students’ attitudes toward SSI, considering socioscientific capital (as indicated by students’ USK profile). The overall discussion of this dissertation focuses on the feasibility of SSI-based teaching and a socioscientific capital approach in the Netherlands. This discussion provides valuable points of departure for the implementation of a socioscientific capital approach in primary and secondary education, keeping in mind the challenges and opportunities that teachers face.