Developing a Measure to Assess Students’ Understanding and Reasoning about Issues of Socioscientific Relevance

Students’ reasoning about socioscientific issues may be motivated by accuracy (i.e., wanting to be correct in an explanation) or by a desired conclusion (i.e., wanting to support their existing belief). We have developed the Reasoning About Socioscientific Issues (RASSI) measure, a three-tier instrument to gauge students’ knowledge, reasoning, and confidence in that reasoning around topics such as the causes of climate change, impact of climate change on extreme weather events, and the availability of freshwater resources. Items were developed to correspond to science topics of social relevance aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards by researchers with backgrounds in educational sciences and Earth sciences, and reviewed by team members with similar backgrounds and significant classroom teaching experience. Initial testing of the instrument with middle and high school students and preservice science teachers shows good distributions of responses across all three types of questions, and further reveals that there is room for growth in students’ knowledge and reasoning about socioscientific issues. We provide a specific example from the RASSI to demonstrate its wording and students’ responses. This instrument may be particularly useful when used in conjunction with lessons that focus on evaluating competing scientific explanations.