Students' environmental NOS views, compassion, intent, and action: Impact of place‐based socioscientific issues instruction

Abstract

Preparing students to achieve the lofty goal of functional scientific literacy entails addressing the normative and non‐normative facets of socioscientific issues (SSI) such as scientific processes, the nature of science (NOS) and diverse sociocultural perspectives. SSI instructional approaches have demonstrated some efficacy for promoting students' NOS views, compassion for others, and decision making. However, extant investigations appear to neglect fully engaging students through authentic SSI in several ways. These include: (i) providing SSI instruction through classroom approaches that are divorced from students' lived experiences; (ii) demonstrating a contextual misalignment between SSI and NOS (particularly evident in NOS assessments); and (iii) framing decision making and position taking analogously—with the latter being an unreliable indicator of how people truly act. The significance of the convergent parallel mixed‐methods investigation reported here is how it responds to these shortcomings through exploring how place‐based SSI instruction focused on the contentious environmental issue of wolf reintroduction in the Greater Yellowstone Area impacted sixty secondary students' NOS views, compassion toward those impacted by contentious environmental issues, and pro‐environmental intent. Moreover, this investigation explores how those perspectives associate with the students' pro‐environmental action of donating to a Yellowstone environmental organization. Results demonstrate that the students' NOS views became significantly more accurate and contextualized, with moderate to large effect, through the place‐based SSI instruction. Through that instruction, the students also exhibited significant gains in their compassion for nature and people impacted by contentious environmental issues and pro‐environmental intent. Further analyses showed that donating students developed and demonstrated significantly more robust and contextualized NOS views, compassion for people and nature impacted by contentious environmental issues, and pro‐environmental intent than their nondonating counterparts. Pedagogical implications include how place‐based learning in authentic settings could better prepare students to understand NOS, become socioculturally aware, and engage SSI across a variety of contexts.

New directions in socioscientific issues research

“…The environmental behaviors field demonstrates that there is only a .45 correlation between stated pro-environmental intentions and enacted behaviors (Gifford & Nilsson, 2014;Kormos & Gifford, 2014). Similar findings have been Zeidler et al Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Science Education Research (2019) shown with recent SSI research that showed only 44% of secondary students who claimed they would readily donate money to resolve environmental issues actually did so (Herman, 2018). Reconciling these deficits and learning how people respond to SSI as part of their lived experience should be among the foremost imperatives for SSI research.…”

“…Furthermore, the students' developed significantly higher levels of nuanced and targeted compassion toward people and nature impacted by SSI and a willingness to resolve those SSI. Herman (2018) also showed that the students who, after the place-based SSI instruction, donated their participant incentive to a Yellowstone environmental organization demonstrated significantly higher degrees of contextualized NOS understanding, compassion for others impacted by SSI, and willingness to resolve SSI than their non-donating peers. Thus, this study appeared to be an initial effort in the SSI field to link NOS and affective variables to an enacted decision with concrete experienced sacrifice.…”

“…Considering the aforementioned research, several deficits appear present with educational experiences occurring solely in formal learning contexts (i.e., classrooms) and research that entails hypothetical scenarios, issues and decisions. These deficits, when allowed to shape SSI instruction and research, appear quite bothersome as they inhibit efforts to help people become adept at becoming citizens who knowledgeably and civically engage SSI in their everyday lives (Herman, 2018). First, students may perceive such SSI learning experiences as detached from their lived experiences.…”

“…Reconciling these deficits and learning how people respond to SSI as part of their lived experience should be among the foremost imperatives for SSI research. More recent efforts in the SSI field (e.g., Herman, 2018;; see also Kinslow et al, 2019 reviewed in this manuscript) have initiated efforts to begin to address such deficits. These studies do so by focusing on utilizing contexts that allow for large groups of students to be immersed in SSI contexts conducive to researching the often-interconnected factors involved in SSI engagement to include in their decisions.…”

“…The studies appearing below are at the forefront of the efforts to use place-based approaches to determine how students engage SSI through more nuanced and contextualized ways. Herman (2018) and Herman et al (2019) investigated 60 secondary students who experienced a week long field SSI instruction focused on the local SSI of wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone National Park. The SSI instruction involved interactions with wildlife ecologists who were involved with the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction and subsequent research and outreach efforts pertaining to the wolves' impact on the Yellowstone ecological and human communities.…”