The effect of teaching socioscientific issues in social studies course on scientific attitudes

The social studies course provides students with the reasoning, critical thinking, decision-making and problem-solving skills they need to solve the problems they encounter in their daily lives. Socioscientific issues can be utilized in the social studies course to provide students with the skills they need to solve daily life problems. The solutions that students find to daily life problems are affected by scientific attitudes as well as skills. In this context, it is important for students to have a scientific attitude in order to choose the best solution that is beneficial for themselves and society. The main purpose of this study is to examine the effect of teaching socioscientific issues in social studies course on students' scientific attitudes. The research was designed according to the embedded mixed design, one of the mixed research method designs. The study group of the research consists of 6th grade students studying in a state secondary school in the 2022-2023 academic year and the social studies teacher working at the school in question. The scientific attitude scale for middle school students, researcher's diary, student anecdotal notebooks, interview forms and checklist were used as data collection tools. In the analysis of the statistical data of the research, t test for independent groups and mixed model ANOVA were used, and inductive data analysis was used in the analysis of qualitative data. In the study, it was concluded that teaching socioscientific topics in the social studies course had a statistically significant effect on students' scientific attitude levels. In addition, it was determined that the research participants were of the opinion that teaching socioscientific issues contributed to the development of scientific attitudes. In line with the results of the research, some suggestions for practice and future research have been developed.