Socioscientific issues: topics and importance to the scientific education

Socioscientific debates arise and become widespread concerning the most popular and innovative issues in our society: transgenics, homeopathy, the impact of mobile phone network and so on. For this reason we believe it is important to analyse the meaning of these debates and the relationship between information processing in newspapers and teaching literature and to determine their possible use in a school context. The common image of scientific news that tends to appear in the media hampers its use in the classroom. On analysing didactic literature, we have selected activities that can be used as a model to plan debates in the science classroom with the objective of developing a series of capacities in students related to scientific literacy, critical thinking and the promotion of a scientific culture.