Aiming for responsible and competent citizenship through teacher professional development on teaching socioscientific inquiry-based learning (SSIBL)

In order to achieve the goal of scientific literacy for responsible citizenship, the importance of developing students' socioscientific inquiry-based learning (SSIBL) has been recognised by an EU FP7 project, PARRISE, including the essential notions of responsible research and innovation (RRI), and citizenship education (CE). The study aims to investigate pre-service primary science teachers' confidence in and need for further education on teaching SSIBL as well as their reflections -in and -on a three-step model SSIBL activity. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were applied in the study. Quantitative methods were applied to collect data from the 76 participating pre-service primary science teachers in Sweden; participants' confidence and need for SSIBL teaching was investigated via a Likert scale questionnaire. The qualitative descriptive analysis method was used to explore participants' reflection-on-action regarding the three-step SSIBL activity and the SSIBL framework. Thematic analyses were applied to analyse the participants' reflection-in-action concerning the design of the three-step SSIBL activity with three aspects of PCK. The results showed that the pre-service teachers had confidence in SSIBL, but still needed further education on SSIBL teaching. The outcomes of the study suggest that developing teachers' SSIBL teaching competence is important and needed from both of the researchers' points of view and the participating teachers' feedback.PARRIS