Analysis of middle school science textbooks for inclusion of socioscientific issues

Developments in science and technology have impact on social life and social values. These developments bring about a number of social issues that will affect the future of societies. These issues, known as socioscientific issues, have both social and science aspects as well as are related to technology. Educational policies state that socioscientific issues should be included in science education in order to raise scientifically literate individuals. What is expected from scientifically literate individuals is to understand the connection between science and technology and produce solutions to the problems encountered in daily life. The aim of this study is to investigate to what extent science textbooks guide students in terms of socioscientific issues. That is, this study aims to examine how and to what extent socioscientific issues are included in secondary school science textbooks. For this purpose, document analysis, one of the qualitative research methods, was used. The data source was a total of eight science textbooks, two books for each grade from 5 to 8. Book are confirmed by the Ministry of National Education to be taught in the 2019-2020-2021 academic periods. As a result of this document analysis, it was determined that socioscientific issues were included in one unit at the fifth grade level, two units at the sixth grade level, three units at the seventh grade level and five units at the eighth grade level. It has been observed that the positive and negative sides of the identified socioscientific issues are generally not presented together. It was also found that the eight textbook were not sufficient to improve students' socioscientific reasoning since the dimensions of socioscientific reasoning were not emphasized adequately. In summary, this study presents findings showing that the investigated science textbooks neither include socioscientific issues nor emphasizes socioscientific reasoning sufficiently. Recommendations have been made based on the findings of the study. Keywords: Science Textbook, Socioscientific Issues, Science Education, Socioscientific Reasoning, Socioscientific Issue-Based Science Education