Olga Ioannidou, Andeas Hetmanek, Frank Fischer, Tina Seidel
As the world is faced with critical issues such as climate change, or the use of vaccines, the call for teaching scientific literacy to pre-service and in-service teachers and students is more prominent than ever. Socio-scientific argumentation (SSA) has been introduced to science education as an attempt to promote civic and scientific literacy (Sadler, 2007). Although teachers embraced the concept as beneficial for students’ learning, they report difficulties in teaching in SSA contexts, because they often do not feel confident and well-prepared to address the complexity of these issues (Juntunen & Aksela, 2014). This problem is amplified by the fact that teachers are expected to teach SSA without having a clear definition and a way to reliably measure it. In order to address this issue, this study investigates the way that researchers define and measure socio-scientific argumentation. A systematic literature review was conducted and a mixed-methods approach was followed. Data was gathered from two electronic databases (Web of Science and EBSCO); from 572 articles retrieved, 75 articles were included in the full-text analysis phase. In the qualitative analysis, a coding scheme was constructed based on content analysis and the articles were analyzed with MAXQDA software. Among other findings, our quantitative analysis revealed that 77% of the articles conceptually connected SSA with scientific literacy, while 59% linked it with civic competencies. Furthermore, most of the studies between 2014 and 2017 presented SSA as issue-specific, while Toulmin Argumentation Pattern (TAP) was the measurement mostly used. As a next step, a pilot study will be conducted in which pre-service teachers will validate the emerged definition and measurement.
