• Journal of Science Education
• /
• v.47 no.2
• /
• pp.180-191
• /
• 2023

The purpose of this study was to investigate the preferred SSI topics of students and teachers in elementary, middle, and high schools. It analyzed the similarity of students' and teachers' preferred SSI topics by school level using the cosine similarity measure. A total of 566 students and 327 teachers from elementary, middle, and high schools participated in the study. Sixty topics were identified and listed in the areas of environment, science and technology, health and medicine, and other social issues based on the literature and SSI programs. Students and teachers were asked to select five of their favorite topics. The data was collected online using SurveyMonkey. The collected data was divided into six groups of students and teachers, and the frequency of topic selection was analyzed within each group. The topic preference similarity was analyzed by calculating vector values based on the frequency of the selected topics and measuring the cosine similarity between students, teachers, and teachers and students by school level. The results are as follows: First, the cosine similarity of SSI Preferred Topics between students' school-level cohorts was higher between middle and high school students (0.982) than between elementary and middle school students (0.651) or between elementary and high school students (0.662). Second, the cosine similarity of SSI Preferred Topics between teachers' school-level cohorts was similar for all comparison groups between elementary, middle, and high school. Third, the SSI topic preference similarity between students and teachers by school level had a higher cosine similarity between the elementary student and teacher cohorts (0.974) than the other school level comparisons, middle school (0.621) or high school (0.645). Access to topics of interest to students in SSI education is strongly associated with motivation and persistence in learning, as well as an enjoyable learning experience and positive attitudes toward learning. Therefore, when designing SSI lessons, it is important to examine topics from the perspective of student interest, especially if the teacher has selected SSI topics that are different from students' preferences. Careful instructional design will be needed to overcome the gap.