Feedback and lesson planning help novice science teachers tackle controversial issues

Socioscientific issues such as climate change, genetically modified foods and pandemic-related controversies have become staples of news media debate, and teaching students to reason about them is now widely treated as central to functional scientific literacy. Yet teachers consistently report that putting such issues into classroom practice is hard. A new open-access study, published on 6 October 2026 in Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Science Education Research, reports that a 13-week professional development programme built around a structured lesson-planning tool helped seven novice science teachers in Türkiye develop more elaborate and better-integrated knowledge for teaching socioscientific issues, with the largest gains appearing in their knowledge of assessment.

The research, conducted by Ümran Betül Cebesoy and Shu-Nu Chang Rundgren, focused on pedagogical content knowledge, or PCK, the integration of subject matter knowledge and pedagogical knowledge that is widely regarded as a key component of teaching quality. The authors examined a domain-specific version of this construct, SSI-PCK, which describes what teachers need to know to teach controversial, multidisciplinary topics that connect scientific knowledge with social, ethical and political dimensions. Effective teaching of such issues demands more than content mastery: teachers must facilitate discussion, support argumentation and guide students through decision-making processes.

Previous studies of SSI-PCK have converged on four core knowledge domains: subject matter knowledge for socioscientific issues, knowledge of instructional strategies, knowledge of students’ understanding, and knowledge of assessment. The study adopted these four components as its analytical framework, noting that they represent the most directly observable and developable aspects of teachers’ practice. Earlier work suggested that teachers often struggle across all of these components, from integrating content knowledge to assessing complex outcomes such as ethical reasoning and argumentation, and that short-term interventions had produced uneven results, with assessment knowledge showing the smallest growth.

The participants were seven grade 5–8 science teachers, six female and one male, with one to four years of teaching experience, enrolled in an SSI-focused elective course in a master’s programme in science education at a state university in Türkiye. All taught in different schools across the country but followed the same centrally regulated science curriculum and used textbooks provided by the Ministry of National Education. Participation was voluntary, and the authors acknowledge that this purposive convenience sample may have introduced self-selection bias, since motivated teachers may have engaged more deeply with the programme.

At the heart of the programme was Content Representation, or CoRe, a lesson-planning instrument first introduced in 2006 that prompts teachers to articulate the big ideas of a topic, students’ likely difficulties and misconceptions, instructional procedures and ways of ascertaining understanding. Teachers first completed an initial CoRe for a self-chosen socioscientific topic, ranging from nuclear power plant construction and pesticide use to organ donation and genetically modified organisms. They then received component-specific written and verbal feedback from the instructor, took part in peer critique and whole-class discussion, revised their plans, implemented the revised lessons in their own classrooms, and finally wrote structured reflection papers on the experience.

The analysis compared initial and revised CoRes using an adapted rubric with four levels, from limited to advanced, across eleven quality indicators. The authors stress that the study was a multiple-case study, not an experiment: the initial and revised CoRes were not treated as pre-test and post-test measures, and the design was not intended to establish a causal effect of the programme. Inter-coder reliability for the rubric coding reached 90 percent, and reflection papers were analysed separately as self-reported accounts rather than direct evidence of classroom practice, since no classroom observations were conducted.

The initial CoRes revealed widespread weaknesses. Three teachers did not refer to big ideas at all, and where big ideas appeared they were often disconnected; one teacher listed the atom, nuclear energy and the environment for a nuclear power plant topic without linking them coherently. Five of the seven presented objectives unrelated to their big ideas, six gave inadequate scientific explanations, and four made no explicit connection between their objectives and the socioscientific dimension of the topic. Knowledge of student understanding was thin, with most teachers naming only a single difficulty or misconception, and knowledge of assessment was limited across all cases: teachers named techniques such as multiple-choice tests or concept maps without explaining why they had chosen them or how they would reveal students’ learning.

After feedback and revision, nearly all components improved to proficient or advanced levels. Teachers articulated coherent big ideas aligned with curriculum objectives, made explicit connections to the knowledge, skills and affective domains of the science curriculum, and strengthened links between scientific content and the social dimensions of their topics. They moved from naming generic approaches such as the 5E learning cycle to describing topic-specific strategies, including animations, graphical representations, daily-life examples, case studies and argumentation. In assessment, the change was most striking: teachers explained the rationale for open-ended questions, scenario-based tasks and matching exercises, and aligned them with specific learning objectives. One teacher, who had previously given no detail about planned interview questions, revised her assessment to include open-ended prompts designed to probe students’ reasoning about pesticide use versus organic fertilizers.

Development was neither uniform nor linear. Across cases, knowledge of assessment showed the greatest overall change, followed by subject matter knowledge, instructional strategies and knowledge of student understanding, which displayed the greatest variation and the smallest overall change. One teacher showed no progress in recognising variation in student understanding or using probing questions, while others developed across all indicators. Gains in scientific accuracy were comparatively modest, suggesting that organising and connecting content responded better to feedback than elaborating the underlying science. The reflection papers added a cautionary note: two teachers interpreted student engagement as confirmation that their planned dilemmas had worked, but two others struggled in enactment. One found it difficult to engage students unfamiliar with controversy in discussion, and another reported that students’ one-sided negative views of genetically modified organisms dominated the debate, preventing a balanced dilemma from emerging.

The authors conclude that sustained, semester-long professional learning, with CoRe embedded in cycles of planning, component-specific feedback, peer discussion, implementation and reflection, is a promising approach to developing novice teachers’ SSI-PCK, but that well-developed lesson plans do not guarantee successful enactment. They recommend that teacher education combine extended professional learning with explicit scaffolding for anticipating student reasoning, facilitating argumentation and assessing multidimensional outcomes, and complement planning tools with opportunities to rehearse and analyse classroom discussions. The findings are context-bound to this group of volunteer teachers in Türkiye and cannot be generalised to all novice science teachers; the authors call for future studies incorporating classroom observations, video analysis and longitudinal follow-up to examine how planned knowledge translates into classroom practice over time.

Subject of Research: Development of pedagogical content knowledge for socioscientific issues-based teaching among novice grade 5–8 science teachers in a 13-week professional development programme

Article Title: Exploring grade 5–8 novice science teachers’ PCK development for socioscientific issues-based teaching

Article References: Cebesoy, Ü. B., & Chang Rundgren, S.-N. (2026). Exploring grade 5–8 novice science teachers’ PCK development for socioscientific issues-based teaching. Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Science Education Research, 8(1), Article 31. https://doi.org/10.1186/s43031-026-00179-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s43031-026-00179-7

Keywords: socioscientific issues, pedagogical content knowledge, science teacher education, professional development, CoRe lesson planning, novice teachers, assessment knowledge, argumentation, scientific literacy, Türkiye, multiple case study, teacher feedback