In the ever-increasing VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex & ambiguous; Bennet & Lemoine, 2014) reality of societies across Europe and beyond, there is a strong need for scientifically literate citizens who are willing and able to contribute to a more sustainable future. Education is seen by many as one of the key factors that can and should contribute to this goal. SDG4.7 explicitly addresses the need to equip all learners with competences that allow them to be(come) active and responsible citizens. SSIBL (Socio-Scientific Inquiry-Based Learning) is a pedagogy that aims to foster responsible citizenship by connecting inquiry driven by socio-scientific issues (SSI) and taking responsible action (Levinson, 2018). In the Horizon2020 project COSMOS, we aim to support schools in their development towards openness (Sarid et al., 2023) by connecting science education to learners’ real lives and stakeholders beyond school walls. An approach combing SSIBL and Communities of Practice (CoP) is central. 

SSIBL combines citizenship education, SSI-based education and inquiry-based learning, in an attempt to promote science in, with and for society underpinned by the responsible research and innovation (RRI) principles of social desirability, ethical acceptability, and sustainability (Levison, 2018). SSIBL consists of three concrete didactical stages: (1) ASK: raising authentic questions through salient SSIs that require a solution; (2) FIND OUT: explore and find answers to these questions through social, personal and scientific inquiry; (3) ACT: collectively taking responsible action towards addressing the SSI (Knippels & van Harskamp, 2018). The focus of SSIBL on identifying solutions through personally-relevant inquiries fosters collective work by students and teachers to address issues relevant to them and their communities.

A CoP is characterised by joint enterprise, which is agreed and negotiated through collective participation and mutual engagement using a shared repertoire of resources co-created over time (e.g., language, values), created when individuals work together within a certain set of social norms and routines and thus develop a shared way of seeing, doing and being, a shared practice (Wenger, 1999). Using SSIBL to learn and mitigate against local, relevant SSIs and contributing to the community can demonstrate the relevance of science to all participating members, creating common ground for collaboration and shared learning, and thus supporting the development of CoPs within these social settings. 

The COSMOS project seeks to explore opportunities to include stakeholders in SSIs (teachers, students, families, scientists, companies, science centres) creating CoP (Wenger, 1999) that collaboratively work towards addressing SSIs through implementing SSIBL in their science education. Through this, we aim to empower teachers with the competency to build their students’ learning of science attitudes as well as their action competence in sustainable development (Sass et al., 2020). Engaging students in SSIBL inherently provides a powerful formative educational experience for science learning and for experiencing the relevance of science to the lives of students, their peers and their families. Employing SSIBL also supports the development of students as personally responsible and justice-oriented citizens (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004). The aim for change in students’ attitudes towards science as well as their action competence in sustainable development, enables students to critically engage with local, global and intercultural issues, understand and appreciate different perspectives, interact respectfully with others, and take responsible action towards sustainability and well-being.

We hypothesize that SSIBL’s explicit focus on scientific, social and personal inquiry and its orientation towards learners’ deliberate action taking, combined with the real-world and collaborative nature of the CoP approach, are a potent mixture to drive student learning. Our central research question in the current proposal is, therefore: What is the impact of SSIBL-CoP implementation on students’ attitudes towards science and action competence?

Research context, data collection. COSMOS aims at supporting open schooling . Teacher teams from primary and secondary schools from the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Portugal, the UK and Israel are supported to implement SSIBL-CoP into their science education, in two rounds of professional development and implementation in practice. The current proposal works with the student data collected from the first implementation round. In total, 480 students from 12 schools participated in online pre-post surveys, complemented with 27 semi-structured group interviews. Data was collected before and within two weeks after SSIBL-CoP implementations. Most implementations centered around environmental and/or sustainability issues. Surveys. The students’ learning outcomes were assessed by using two commonly applied validated quantitative measurement instruments: the Pupils’ Attitudes Towards Technology/Science (PATT; Ardies et al., 2014), and the Self-Perceived Action Competence Scale (SPACS; Olsson et al., 2020). While the first taps into students’ science career aspirations, interest in science, tediousness of science, gendered science views, relevance and perceived difficulty, the latter taps into students’ self-perceptions of how much they know about contributing to sustainability, their self-effectiveness and willingness to act towards sustainability. Each of these concepts is measured through a minimum of three items on a 5-point Likert-scale. Interviews. The survey data were supported by qualitative data using semi-structured group interviews with three students per project implementation. The group interviews provide extra information on the effect of the SSIBL-CoP-implementation on students, in more particular the experience of the pedagogical processes within the implementation and its influence on their attitudes towards science and action competence. Data analyses. We used personal identifiers of individual students within schools to track the students’ responses to the surveys across time. Given the limited number of schools in the first implementation round, the current data analyses apply repeated measures t-tests to study differences pre-post implementation. By the time of the presentation itself, the second implementation round will have passed, and more advanced data analyses will be possible. For the group interviews, we conducted a synthesis in the form of a deductive thematic analysis. We structured our inquiry using the concepts of the modified version of the PATT (Ardies et al., 2014) and the SPACS (Olsson et al., 2020) as potential themes in our analysis.

Findings.The current quantitative results show differences pre-post implementation for some of the subscales of the two main learning outcomes targeted. Overall, the current intermediate results after one round of professional development and implementation of SSIBL-CoP , show small to moderate effects (Cohen’s d < 0.5) in terms of the students’ interest in science and perceived relevance of science. No overall effects were observed for the students’ science career aspirations, gendered views of science, perceived tediousness and difficulty of science. In terms of action competence, the intermediate results point out small to moderate effects (Cohen’s d < 0.5) in terms of confidence in their own influence to contribute to a more sustainable world as well as their willingness to act accordingly. No overall effect was observed for the student’s self-perceived knowledge of action possibilities. Analyses of the group interviews are ongoing, and will be included in the presentation at ECER. Conclusions. Across the 12 schools that participated in the first implementation round, students report increased interest in science as well as attributing increased relevance to science. The initial results also show that implementing SSIBL-CoP, in which schools specifically work on real world SSI, apply scientific, social and personal inquiry, and collaborate with stakeholders in that SSI, positively impact students’ confidence in in their own influence and their willingness to act towards sustainability. It is important to stress that these are initial results, and they are aggregated across all the schools in the sample. Differences among schools will exist, e.g. pertaining to the educational level (primary and secondary), the type of education offered at the schools (academic or vocational), and the implementation fidelity of the SSIBL-CoP approach. After the second implementation round, we will be able to address such differences in more detail.

Ardies, J., De Maeyer, D., Gijbels, S., & Van Keulen, H. (2014). Students’ attitudes towards technology. International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 25(1), 43-65. Bennet, N., & Lemoine, G.J. (2014). What a difference a world makes: Understanding threats to performance in a VUCA world. Business Horizons, 57(3), 311-317. Knippels, M.C., & Van Harskamp, M., (2018). An educational sequence for implementing socio-scientific inquiry-based learning (SSIBL). School Science Review, 100, 46-52. Levinson, R. (2018). Introducing socio-scientific inquiry-based learning (SSIBL). School Science Review, 100(371), 31-35. Olsson, D., Gericke, N., Sass, W., & Boeve-de Pauw, J., (2020). Self-perceived action competence for sustainability: The theoretical grounding and empirical validation of a novel research instrument. Environmental Education Research, 26(5), 742-760. Sass, W., Boeve-de Pauw, J., Olsson, D., Gericke, N., De Maeyer, S., & Van Petegem, P. (2020). Redefining action competence: The case of sustainable development. The Journal of Environmental Education, 51(4), 292–305. Wenger, E. (1999). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press. Westheimer, J., & Kahne, J. (2004). What kind of citizen? The politics of educating for democracy. American Educational Research Journal, 41(2), 237-269.