The High Relevance of Socio-environmental Issues in the Perception of Undergraduate Students, Teachers and Researchers

Abstract

Although studies on the relationship between science, technology and society in science education have grown since the 1990s, researches carried out in the following decade indicated that these approaches were still incipient in schools and that there was a great diversity of notions about what these approaches should be like. This article presents the results of a perception research on science teaching among undergraduate students in biology, physics and chemistry, and teachers and researchers in these areas. The questionnaire sought the opinion of this community on what the focus of science education should be and on the level of relevance attributed to issues related to the scientific canon and socio-environmental issues. The results show that the latter are of the highest relevance to the aforementioned community, which believes that there must be a balance between training new scientists and training citizens for decision-making on issues involving science and technology.