Abstract:Socio-scientific Issues (SSI) is a pedagogical framework for developing students' scientific literacy through the use of complex scientific issues in the real world that are related to students' daily lives, guiding students towards ethical and responsible negotiation and decision-making based on scientific contents and moral considerations of multiple perspectives. Under the vision of the Compulsory Education Science Curriculum Standards (2022 Edition), SSI instruction is an appropriate framework for implementing the educational concepts and teaching strategies of the new standards, and an effective way to cultivate science literacy. However, in practice SSI instruction in primary science classrooms in China are still limited, and its value in primary science education need be further explored. This paper proposed that SSI teaching in primary school should take “attitude & responsibility” as the entry point, and be based on the interaction among the four dimensions of core literacy. To do so, we can start from three aspects: clarifying the constituent dimensions of attitude and responsibility literacy and forming assessment framework; shifting from informal reasoning to social-scientific reasoning, paying attention to the cognitive and affective aspects of social-scientific perspective taking; integrating scientific modelling and SSI teaching to explore the mutual promotion of scientific thinking and “attitude & responsibility”.
