Impact of place‐based socioscientific issues instruction on students' contextualization of socioscientific orientations

Abstract

This investigation examined how a 6 week environmental topics course that included place‐based socioscientific issues (SSI) instruction in the Greater Yellowstone Area (GYA) in the United States of America influenced 21 postsecondary students' expressed socioscientific orientations of Ecological Worldviews (including Interconnectedness and Sustainable Development); Social and Moral Compassion (including Moral and Ethical Sensitivity, Perspective Taking, and Empathetic Concern); Socioscientific Accountability (including Feelings of Responsibility and Willingness to Act); and Scientific Evidence Views (including Affordances and Constraints of Scientific Evidence). The students, who were enrolled in diverse academic majors, provided significantly different and better contextualizedtu qualitative responses across all eight socioscientific orientation dimensions after the SSI course. For instance, the students often referred to SSI they experienced, such as when indicating feeling more connected to nature and accountable for compassionate and sustainable environmental issues resolution. Moreover, the students were better able to utilize the perspectives of those they interacted with who were incurring SSI impacts (e.g., ranchers and Native Americans in the GYA) to knowledgably articulate how effective SSI resolution requires weighing scientific evidence in juxtaposition with sociocultural and ethical considerations. The coherence to which our methodological approaches and socioscientific orientation rubrics revealed how the students expressed complex cognitive, emotive, and intentional variables highlight the importance of the SSI field's need to use such standardized qualitative measures. Pedagogical considerations addressed include how to effectively implement place‐based instruction where students engage diverse groups of people experiencing and resolving SSI where they occur.

‘I wouldn’t want to be the animal in use nor the patient in need’ – the role of issue familiarity in students’ socioscientific argumentation

“…An aspect that was not explicitly examined as part of this study concerns the role of emotions. While other studies, such as Herman et al (2021), demonstrate how placebased (i.e. immersive) SSI experiences can encourage students to tap into their emotions, future research needs to investigate to what extent this is equally possible in a classroom setting.…”

CAREER: Rethinking How Middle and High School Students Analyze and Interpret Ecological Data

“…A locus of place-based educational research in science education settings has been on ecology and the environment (Frisch et al, 2010;Herman et al, 2021;Kudryavtsev et al, 2012;Marin & Bang, 2018;Semken & Freeman, 2008), with students' recording and analysis of data comprising a notable subset of this work (Echeverria et al, 2021;Niemiller et al, 2021;Stapleton & Reif, 2022;l Stroupe & Carlone, 2021;Unger et al, 2020;Wright et al, 2021). In the instances of place-based education set in ecology and environmental contexts, students record, curate or organize, and graph or otherwise interpret the data they have created, such as during a bioblitz in which students record as many unique organisms around museums (Aristeidou et al, 2021).…”

The role of phenomena and problems in science andSTEMeducation: Traditional, contemporary, and future approaches

“…Thus, the purpose might have been retroactively framed so that students engage in science and engineering to make sense of phenomena and problems as scientists and engineers do in their professional work. Another plausible reason is that, in response to the need to define the purpose of science and engineering learning, major research programs in science and engineering education focused on how students engage with phenomena and problems through place‐based learning (Endreny, 2010; Haywood, 2014; Semkin & Freeman, 2008; Tolbert & Knox, 2016), project‐based learning (Harris et al, 2015; Krajcik & Czerniak, 2013; Miller et al, 2021), problem‐based learning (Hmelo‐Silver, 2004; Marra et al, 2014), and socio‐scientific issue learning (Herman et al, 2021; Sadler et al, 2017). As will be described in the Proposed Future Approaches in STEM Education section below, these research programs give students a purpose for science learning, but they often address phenomena or problems that are disconnected from pressing societal challenges and/or do not devote sufficient attention to the disproportionate impact of pressing societal challenges on minoritized groups.…”

“…(Lee, 2020). From an equity perspective, through place‐based learning, students use science and engineering in their daily lives, home, and community (Endreny, 2010; Haywood, 2014; Herman et al, 2021; Semkin & Freeman, 2008; Tolbert & Knox, 2016). From a science perspective, through project‐based learning, students use science ideas as they investigate a driving question to explain a phenomenon (Harris et al, 2015; Krajcik & Czerniak, 2013; Miller et al, 2021).…”

“…From an engineering perspective, through problem‐based learning, students learn science in the context of solving an authentic problem (Hmelo‐Silver, 2004; Marra et al, 2014). From a scientific literacy perspective (Ke et al, 2021), through socio‐scientific issue learning, students address complex and contentious societal issues (Herman et al, 2021; Sadler et al, 2017).…”