Students’ Reasoning about the Future of Disturbed or Protected Ecosystems &amp; the Idea of the ‘Balance of Nature’

Ergazaki, Marida; Ampatzidis, Georgios

doi:10.1007/s11165-011-9208-7

Cited by 26 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…After several decades of relevant research, we know for certain that learning and teaching physics is strongly influenced by the common naive mental representations of the students. In a number of fields such as Physics, Chemistry or Biology (Skoumios & Hatzinikita, 2006;Kampeza & Ravanis, 2009;Ergazaki & Ampatzidis, 2012;Sunyono, Ibrahim, & Yuanita, 2013;Fragkiadaki & Ravanis, 2015;Allen & Kambouri-Danos, 2016;Meli, Koliopoulos, Lavidas & Papalexiou, 2016;Ouasri, 2017;Kalogiannakis, Ampartzaki, Papadakis & Skaraki, 2018), it is firmly established that students' mental representations are incompatible with models drawn from the sciences themselves and are commonly used in school education.…”

Section:  Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mental representations of 14-15 years old students about the light propagation time

Ravanis¹,

Kaliampos

2018

JPP

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Mental representations of 14-15 years old students about the light propagation time. Objectives: The study of students' representations of physics concepts and phenomena constitutes a central part of science education research, as they play a decisive role in teaching. In the study presented here, we investigate the mental representations of 14-15 years old students about the light propagation time, before they were taught about it in school. Methods: The empirical data was gathered through an interview using three tasks which involved the evaluation of hypothetical situations. The research data included representations that cause difficulty in the comprehension of the position of a light source in relevance to the light propagation time. Findings: Most of students assumed that the identification of the light propagation time is strongly correlated with the large distance between the light source and the receiver. Conclusion: This study concluded that the arrangement of objects in space strongly influences the students' thinking.

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Section:  Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mental representations of 14-15 years old students about the light propagation time

Ravanis¹,

Kaliampos

2018

JPP

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“…Big Idea 5: The fifth big idea about ES involves concepts associated with resilience and change . Learner views related to change in ecosystems are rather diverse, including viewing ecosystems as: (i) infinitely resilient because of teleological, “vitalistic forces”; (ii) destroyed because of change or “imbalance’; or (iii) stable or unchanging absent human actions (e.g., Ergazaki & Ampatzidis, ; Hovardas & Korfiatis, ; Inagaki & Hatano, ; Sander et al, ). While learners’ views are diverse, many of these conceptions are inappropriately reinforced when educators use the “balance of nature” metaphor (Hovardas & Korfiatis, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Defining and characterizing ecosystem services for education: A Delphi study

Ruppert

Duncan

2017

J Res Sci Teach

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Recent advancements in science have led to an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the many ways in which humans benefit from environmental systems. These benefits, termed Ecosystem Services, are sparsely characterized in education literature, but were included in the most recent iteration of US national science standards: the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). In this paper, we introduce the concept of Ecosystem Services and discuss why it is emerging as an important idea to teach. Specifically, we present a definition and set of big conceptual ideas about ecosystem services developed using a Delphi technique: a method that uses repeat survey of a panel of experts in a domain, to reach a consensus about important ideas. Using the central ideas that emerged during this study, we developed a refined model of coupled human-environment systems that articulates multiple human populations as embedded within ecosystems, connected to these ecosystems near and far, and benefiting from the resources and conditions provisioned by these ecosystems. We discuss the implications of this model to future education research, as well as to future revisions of Disciplinary

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“…These balance-ensuring natural mechanisms or recovery mechanisms have also been traced in students' reasoning in other studies. For instance, in a study by Ergazaki and Ampatzidis (2012), the first-year educational sciences students who were asked to reason about the future of ecosystems that suffered human-driven disturbances found it very likely for the ecosystems to fully recover their initial state. To justify their prediction, they mainly appealed to (1) a recovery process that restores the initial balance, and (2) to recovery mechanisms as an ecosystems' inherent feature.…”

Section: Core Ideasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward an “Anti-Balance of Nature” Learning Environment for Non-Biology Major Students: Learning Objectives and Design Criteria

Ampatzidis

Ergazaki

2017

Natural Sciences Education

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Core Ideas We report on the design of a learning environment against the “balance of nature.” Its learning objectives and design criteria were based on the “resilient nature.” Its first version was implemented in a case study with 41 non‐biology major students. Modifications of the design criteria/learning objectives were based on the results. Using sub‐models to simulate an ecosystem's contingent trajectories is one of them. This article reports on the design of a learning environment against the idea of the “balance of nature” (BON) for non‐biology major students. Our focus is set on how we shaped and reshaped the learning objectives and design criteria for such a learning environment in the first two phases of our developmental research. In the exploratory phase, we first performed a thorough review of the ecological literature on ecosystems’ function, which led us to use the contemporary idea of the “resilient nature” for shaping our learning objectives (e.g., understanding multiple alternative states). Then, guided by the latter, we shaped our design criteria (e.g., using simulations of ecosystems that perform human‐triggered or human‐free shifts between alternative stable states) and used them to design the first version of our computer‐supported, anti‐BON learning environment, theoretically informed by social constructivism and problem‐posing approach. In the first research cycle, we performed a pre/post design case study with 41 first‐year educational sciences students enrolled for an optional ecology‐course, to test whether the learning environment actually promoted the idea of contingency in ecosystems’ behavior. According to our findings, this was not the case. Most of the students (1) found even more appealing the idea that protected nature remains unchanged, and (2) moved from the idea of the “always‐recovering” nature to that of the “never‐recovering” one. Significant modifications of the design criteria and minor restatements of the learning objectives, as well as how these emerged in the light of our findings, are thoroughly discussed in the article.

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Students’ Reasoning about the Future of Disturbed or Protected Ecosystems & the Idea of the ‘Balance of Nature’

Cited by 26 publications

References 21 publications

Mental representations of 14-15 years old students about the light propagation time

Mental representations of 14-15 years old students about the light propagation time

Defining and characterizing ecosystem services for education: A Delphi study

Toward an “Anti-Balance of Nature” Learning Environment for Non-Biology Major Students: Learning Objectives and Design Criteria

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