STEM Education Through Socioscientific Issues: Opportunities And Challenges To Achieving Social Justice

Abstract

This paper argues for the importance of embedding social justice consideration when we do STEM education. In our earlier study, we reported that using ‘obesity’ as a socioscientific issue has supported university students to consider social, political and moral aspects associated with the issue in a general education course. As a follow-up study, which we report in this paper, we identified students who insisted that obesity is a self-inflicted problem and resisted to consider obesity in terms of broader societal aspects. Interviews were conducted to elicit their reasoning. It was found that reasoning biases and underestimation of the power of marketing explained their resistance. This points to the need (1) to teach probabilistic reasoning that facilitates students to discern epidemiological knowledge claims and personal experiential knowledge and (2) to raise students’ awareness toward the broader context that shapes direct-to-child marketing to facilitate a shift to considering social justice dimension of obesity.