Fostering Moral Sensitivity through Socioscientific Issues: A Sustainable Approach to 21st Century Science Education

Abstract

This article sought to give an overview on the use of socio-scientific issues (SSI) to promote moral sensitivity among secondary school students. Through literature review, this article examined the role of SSI in promoting moral sensitivity in order to support the development of holistic citizenry. Given that Malaysian science curriculum has explicitly incorporated socioscientific issues (SSI) into the secondary school syllabus, it is worthwhile to investigate the extent to which students demonstrate moral sensitivity toward SSI. Thus a total of 307 Form Four students from six secondary schools in Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia, were randomly selected to participate in the study. An instrument adapted from Test for Ethical Sensitivity, TESS (Clarkeburn 2002) and TESSplus (Fowler, Zeidler & Sadler 2009) had been used to measure the level of moral sensitivity among students. The findings revealed that the respondents demonstrated a high level of scores in Moral Sensitivity Test across all three SSI presented, namely Genetically Modified Crop Dilemma, Human Cloning Issue and Pharmaceutical Milk and Genetically Modified Cow issue. These results imply that the incorporation of relevant SSI into science education is capable of nurturing students’ moral sensitivity.