Education Sciences

Socioscientific issues (SSIs) provide meaningful contexts for developing students’ competencies in scientific evaluation and decision-making. This study developed an SSI-based instructional unit to support primary school students in making decisions about genome-edited fish by considering risks and benefits and proposing risk mitigation. The study aimed to examine the unit’s effectiveness in improving students’ risk-related decision-making and their attitudes toward critical thinking and risk. Sixty-three fifth-grade students participated in an 18-lesson unit comprising two phases: information gathering and risk management practice. Students completed three decision-making tasks and a post-unit questionnaire on related attitudes. Written arguments were analysed using a rubric based on claims, risk knowledge, benefit knowledge, and risk mitigation. The results indicated that the unit improved the quality of students’ socioscientific arguments. By the final task, about 60% of arguments reached the highest level, demonstrating integration of risk knowledge and corresponding mitigation. However, students’ risk–benefit emphasis ratings showed that their decisions remained predominantly risk-focused, and questionnaire data revealed a persistent zero-risk mindset. These findings provide empirical evidence that an SSI-based unit incorporating risk management practice can foster primary students’ risk-related socioscientific decision-making. Further refinement is needed to shift students’ risk attitudes and support more balanced risk–benefit reasoning.

Although pre-service teachers play a crucial role in promoting safe mobility among children, there are no validated instruments to assess their civic competencies, knowledge, and behaviors in road safety education. Existing questionnaires primarily target the general population or college students, and thus it remains unclear whether future teachers are adequately prepared to deliver road safety education. This study aims to design and validate a tool to assess pre-service teachers’ behavior in situations related to traffic safety and their knowledge of road safety education.. The designed tool is a questionnaire made up of 32 items distributed across five dimensions. The questionnaire’s content was validated through the judgment of eight experts, who ensured the relevance and adequacy of its items. The confirmatory factor analysis of data obtained from a pilot sample was used to examine the questionnaire’s structure, and reliability was assessed using Cronbach’s alpha coefficient. After analyzing the responses of 388 participants, the results suggest that the questionnaire’s overall structure is adequate and satisfactory reliability coefficients were obtained. The confirmatory factor analysis supported the proposed four-factor structure, indicating good model fit. These findings suggest that a valid and reliable diagnostic tool can identify the road safety training needs of future teachers and inform curriculum design and targeted educational interventions to enhance road safety competencies in schools.

Pragmatic language is a core component of school-based social participation, yet children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Social Communication Disorder (SCD) frequently experience persistent difficulties in using language appropriately across everyday learning contexts. This study investigated the effectiveness of a culturally adapted, school-based immersive Virtual Reality (VR) learning program designed to enhance pragmatic language and social communication skills among Thai primary school children. Eleven participants aged 7–12 years completed a three-week, ten-session VR program that simulated authentic classroom, playground, and canteen interactions aligned with Thai sociocultural norms. Outcomes were measured using the Social Communication Questionnaire (SCQ) and the Pragmatic Behavior Observation Checklist (PBOC). While SCQ scores showed a small, non-significant reduction (p = 0.092), PBOC results demonstrated significant improvements in three foundational pragmatic domains: Initiation and Responsiveness (p = 0.032), Turn-Taking and Conversational Flow (p = 0.037), and Politeness and Register (p = 0.010). Other domains showed no significant changes. These findings suggest that immersive, culturally relevant VR environments can support early gains in core pragmatic language behaviors within educational settings, although broader social communication outcomes may require longer or more intensive learning experiences.