Fostering Students’ Values Through Role Play about Socioscientific Issues

During the course of international curriculum reform, decision making about socioscientific issues (SSI)—open-ended controversial issues with connections to science, technology, and society—has been labeled a critical tool for achieving scientific literacy. Therefore, enhancing students’ socioscientific decision making as part of science education has become a pressing issue; global SSI affect people every day. This leads people worldwide to collaboratively involve in decision-making processes to solve these ill-structured problems for the sake and safety of humanity. Values are core principles and guidelines that support socioscientific decision making. Therefore, recent conceptualizations of scientific literacy also consider values a core component of this vision of science education. However, few instructional strategies have been provided to support students’ enactment of character and values. Role play has proven to be an effective way of socioscientific decision making because it can empower students’ emotive, intuitive, and ethical reasoning, through which students can enact and develop values regarding SSI. In this paper, we provide an example lesson plan for fostering high school students’ values and decision making about the issue of nuclear energy through role play.