User:Ijwilliams/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Socio-scientific issues

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because I found the concept of socio-scientific issues to be interesting and is a subject of relevance to all of society. My preliminary impression is that this article needs work as it has a banner notifying the reader that the article is written like an argumentative essay that includes the author's personal opinions.

Evaluate the article
The lead of this article explains what socio-scientific issues are and lists some examples as well as mentioning the impact of socio-scientific issues on the learning of scientific concepts by students. The lead could be more concise and could also reference more of what the rest of the article entails.

Although the content of the article seems to be pretty balanced in what it does include, it could use more context as to what socio-scientific issues (SSI) are as it relates to the classroom since this is the lens under which the concept is discussed. Discussing it as a teaching technique confuses what exactly this subject is all about. More context on the subject would help to connect more of the dots here.

It is immediately clear due to the warning banner that there is some opinionated language here in this article. While this article has been flagged for this, it is not immediately obvious to me what this language could be or where the opinion comes in.

At first glance it seems as though there is a good amount of sources for the amount of information on the page, however, under further inspection there seems to be a multitude of sources that can only be attributed to two different authors. These two names are prevalent in the references list which has created a lack of diversity in the authors of the sources used. The sources also seem to range only from the years 2000 to 2011 thus making them pretty far out of date. The sources could use some updating and also some diversification.

The layout of this article is probably the most difficult thing to get around. It isn't very straightforward. Although there are no grammatical errors, the way the information is presented is confusing and isn't written as though the reader is new to this concept. It is lacking in context but what is there is still quite difficult to follow.

There are no images.

The talk page of this article echoes many of the thoughts that I had upon reading this article. It discusses the unbalances sources and also the way that the article is clearly not discussing socio-scientific issues in general but rather the use of them in an educational setting. There are multiple suggestions to switch the title of this essay out for the broader one of "Socio-cultural issues" to something more specific to what the article actually discusses.

The article overall seems incomplete and in need of a lot of work. The writing of the article is okay in terms of grammar and keeping to the central themes presented. However, without the proper context this isn't enough to outweigh the many issues with this article.