Promoting students’ use of content knowledge in SSI reasoning through laboratory activities

The paper presents the results of a teaching intervention aimed at improving students’ use of content knowledge when reasoning about Socio-Scientific Issues (SSI). Target concepts were energy and models. The construction of an incinerator and a nuclear power plant have been chosen as controversial social issues. The intervention resembled how science knowledge is produced, communicated and validated. More specifically, the activities were: the reading of issue-focused papers, class discussions and laboratory experiments with low cost materials aimed to explicitly show the role of the addressed concepts in the issues. The implementation was conducted with a total of 128 Italian high school students (14-16 years old). An experimental-control group research design was adopted. The experimental (67) and control (61) groups followed the same activities except for the laboratory experiments and data analysis. The results show that students in the experimental group were significantly more able to use the addressed concepts to justify their decisions on the proposed controversial issues than students of the control group. This study supports the introduction of laboratory activities in SSI teaching interventions to promote students’ use of content knowledge in their reasoning about science-related social controversies.