According to the national education standards set by the standing Conference of Education Ministers in Germany in 2004, one of the central aims of science education in schools is to develop the competency of responsible decision-making. However, appropriate didactic and methodical concepts remain rare. Against this background, a targeted teaching unit for secondary schools including all teaching resources (worksheets, sample solutions, handouts, etc.) has been developed and evaluated. We have chosen electric vehicles as a contemporary context, since there seems to be no consensus in the public debate on this topic yet. Therefore, good arguments abound and can easily be found either for or against the new technology. As an introduction to the unit, students are asked to make a choice for one of two controversial, opposing articles presented to them. They are also asked to estimate how confident they are about their choice on a Likert scale. During the following lessons, students explore the topic not only through physical and technical principles, but also consider aspects outside the technical sphere. At the end students are asked to write their own composition in form of a newspaper article on the subject. The way they base their decisions on their arguments is analysed and assessed. This paper reports on the structure and the materials of the teaching unit as well as classroom experiences.

In the ever-changing landscape of educational practice and policy, educators oftentimes find it difficult to obtain adequate training and resources. This places a unique burden on education researchers to develop both content materials as well as professional development programs. The adoption and implementation of the federal No Child Left Behind legislation led to a renewed emphasis on writing and literacy strategies throughout the curriculum, including the sciences. Also, continual underperforming on national and international benchmarks (NAEP, PISA, TIMSS) has led to significant efforts in this country in the past few years to revitalize and improve the quality of student science instruction and scientific literacy. The latter reflects the need to address the broad challenges of modern society on the general public and our students alike within the science classroom and “entails being able to read with understanding articles about science in the popular press.” However, while a clear working definition of the term remains elusive and transient, various efforts have been made to address individual aspects of scientific literacy. One facet is the ability to distinguish between and utilize different aspects of argumentation such as physical, societal, and political criteria for decision-making, which is also reflected within the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). In this paper we introduce an example of a physics content-based approach to further students’ competency in argumentation- based decision-making.

Internalizing the process and methods of scientific research is fundamental both for young people who are getting prepared to work as scientific researchers, as well as for those who participate in social discourses on scientific issues as responsible citizens. In addition, many current problems can not only be solved from a specialist perspective; interdisciplinary cooperation plays an important role in research and society. It is therefore important that teachers know teaching concepts that enable students to acquire competencies to be prepared for these challenges in life. To implement this, a new pre-service teacher study curriculum was developed as part of the MINTplus2 (engl. STEMplus2) project at TU Darmstadt, which conveys interdisciplinary teaching approaches, especially about STEM. As a part of this project, we developed a new seminar which focusses especially on didactic concepts like inquiry-based learning in order to prepare pre-service science teachers to convey their students the methodological knowledge of the scientific research process. This paper shows the seminar structure embedded in the whole project and the first evaluation results with n=14 concept maps of seven students that show that there is a measurable increase in knowledge regarding the seminar topic.