Fostering students’ socioscientific decision-making: exploring the effectiveness of an environmental science competition

Abstract

To make informed decisions has been acknowledged as an essential ability to negotiate socioscientific issues. However, many young people show an inadequate understanding of how to make well-informed decisions, particularly in contexts that are connected to environmental problems. This paper aims to explore the effectiveness of an environmental science competition (BundesUmweltWettbewerb, BUW) to foster students' socioscientific decision-making. Two different instruments, a paper-pencil test (N = 196 students) and retrospective interviews (N = 10 students), have been used in two successive studies. In addition, both of the applied instruments are investigated theoretically using the "assessment triangle" of the National Research Council (National Research Council, Knowing What Students Know, 2001) as a framework. The results of our studies indicate that participating in the environmental science competition predominantly fosters students' socioscientific decision-making in its preselectional phase. We further argue that promoting the selectional phase of decision-making requires explicit and instructional guidance. With respect to the assessment of socioscientific decision-making, a focus on either structural (decision-making strategies) or contextual (decision content) conditions is argued. Outcomes are discussed in terms of theoretical and practical implications.

First steps toward gender equity in the chemistry Olympiad: Understanding the role of implicitgender‐sciencestereotypes

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Rethinking the Curriculum in the Context of Education for Sustainability: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…The importance of decision making in the context of socio-scientific issues is well established [49][50][51].The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by a mysterious respiratory illness, has illustrated such importance. Indeed, in the context of the pandemic, people have had to make decisions not just about health and safety issues, but also about a variety of everyday activities, like where to eat (e.g., indoors, outdoors), where or whether to travel, even how many times one could do to the bakery or grocery.…”

Teaching Socioscientific Issues through Scientific Scenarios: A Case Evaluation Based on Secondary School Students’ Views

“…Because scientific scenarios include controversial situations that will enable argumentation in the solution process of problems based on daily life examples in the scenario (Rebello et al, 2013;Suephatthima & Faikhamta, 2018). Many researchers (Garrecht et al, 2020;Günter, 2020;Mills et al, 2021;Mio et al, 2019;Sailer et al, 2021;Shen et al, 2021;Zeidler et al, 2019) mention the benefits and effectiveness of using scenarios with different strategies, methods and techniques in education. In this context, scientific scenarios are used in studies such as problem-based teaching (Günter, 2020), online learning (Mio et al, 2019;Sailer et al, 2021;Shen et al, 2021) and socioscientific issues (Garrecht et al, 2020;Zeidler et al al., 2019).…”

“…Many researchers (Garrecht et al, 2020;Günter, 2020;Mills et al, 2021;Mio et al, 2019;Sailer et al, 2021;Shen et al, 2021;Zeidler et al, 2019) mention the benefits and effectiveness of using scenarios with different strategies, methods and techniques in education. In this context, scientific scenarios are used in studies such as problem-based teaching (Günter, 2020), online learning (Mio et al, 2019;Sailer et al, 2021;Shen et al, 2021) and socioscientific issues (Garrecht et al, 2020;Zeidler et al al., 2019). Genetic issues, which we face frequently in daily life, are also discussed within the scope of SSIs.…”