A Matter of Content : Biology Teachers’ Understanding of Socioscientific Issues

This paper investigates Danish upper secondary biology teachers’ understandings and implementations of socioscientific issues in biology teaching and assessment. We conducted group interviews with 11 biology
teachers. On the basis of the talk-in-interaction in the interviews, we designed a questionnaire with open questions to which 100 Danish biology teachers responded. We found that the teachers generally entertained a content-centered understanding of socioscientific issues, according to which biological content has primacy over the societal contextualization of a given issue. Further, we found that when teachers assess students in relation to socioscientific issues, they focus their assessment on students’ ability to invoke biological subject
specific content knowledge. We argue that the beliefs and understandings that we identified may undermine the very rationale of introducing socioscientific issues in science teaching. On the basis of our findings, we suggest strategies to support teachers in viably implementing socioscientific issues in their teaching.