The effect of teachers' sociological understanding of science (SUS) on curricular innovation

Science education reform initiatives advocate incorporating more accurate portrayals of science in the high school classroom that attend to science in its larger social context. However, conveying such understandings will require teachers to possess new knowledge about how science is practised. This paper reports research that investigated the effect of teachers' sociological understanding of science (SUS) on their design and implementation of curriculum innovations. It concludes that teachers' SUS level strongly influences their ability to innovate; knowledge about science is necessary, but not sufficient, for sociologically informed curricula.