Controversial issues in school education : An overview of what controversial issues are based on, how they can be assessed and why they are important.

The primary goal with this literature review was to develop a better understanding of controversial issues within school education. We formulated three questions that would help us reach this goal: What constitutes controversial issues?? How can they be assessed from a didactic point of view? Why can controversial issues be important to discuss? Our working method consisted of systematically searching for relevant literature by using a combination of selected keywords. The collected literature was evaluated and selected to be included in the results based on relevancy, The results demonstrated that controversial issues are often complex in nature, polarizing and very present in social science-education. Furthermore, there are several didactic models and tools that can be used to deal with controversial issues in educational settings. As such, our analysis shows that controversial issues may be integrated in teaching practices. This will increase the possibility for students to develop both knowledge and skills to deal with controversial questions. In social science education, teaching about controversial political issues prepares students to participate in a democratic society, enabling them to engage in discussion on controversial topics in productive and sensitive ways