Values Use in Undergraduate Students’ Socio‐Hydrological Reasoning: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Core Ideas Socio‐scientific issues prepare students for real‐world experiences. Socio‐hydrological reasoning involves the use of values. Value identifications differ between developing and developed countries. Value use frequency differs between developed and developing countries. Growing human populations place increasing demands on our planet, resulting in an array of challenges with both scientific and non‐scientific dimensions. These challenges are collectively known as socio‐scientific issues (SSIs). It is essential to understand how students learn to use values to reason about SSIs, particularly when dealing with water‐related challenges. This research strives to better understand undergraduate students’ reasoning to provide instructors with insights into ways to implement innovative instruction about socio‐hydrological issues. With 96% of behavioral research involving participants from developed countries, this study strives to better understand socio‐hydrologic reasoning (SHR) of students from developing countries. We investigate questions focusing on values undergraduate students from developed and developing countries identify with, how those values are used in SHR, and if reasoning differs between the two groups. Results show a significant difference between the two groups’ value identification, as well as the use of those values in their SHR. There is a significant difference in the quality of reasoning between the two groups, with students from developing countries reasoning at a higher quality than their developed country counterparts. This study begins to shed light on how students use their values to reason, which can afford educators the opportunity to provide students with the support needed to increase the quality of their reasoning.

Cultivating Water Literacy in STEM Education: Undergraduates’ Socio-Scientific Reasoning about Socio-Hydrologic Issues

“…Although the demand for research that illuminates the potential for undergraduate courses that do so is high, few studies have explored the development of SSR in the context of SHI. In doing so, this study builds upon and contributes to prior research on teaching and learning about natural and managed water systems, particularly in undergraduate STEM [11][12][13]19,20,52,53] and non-STEM [54,55] contexts, where new courses that employ innovative, effective approaches to exploring challenges regarding water resource use and management are emerging (e.g., [2,12,13,19,48,[56][57][58][59]. Additionally, the findings herein contribute to the broader literature base focused on SSI teaching and learning, where SSI have served as viable contexts for the development of science content knowledge and practice skills (e.g., [31,32], as well as habits of mind and reasoning skills, such as perspective taking and exhibiting skepticism when confronted with various media [39], that are not scientific in nature, but equally important to the development of informed resolutions [17,48,[60][61][62][63].…”

“…Given that SSI have generally served as meaningful contexts for students' to better understand the science concepts that underlie SSI, as well as for reasoning about societal aspects of SSI by way of engagement in SSR (i.e., functional scientific literacy), we would expect SHI to serve similarly as meaningful contexts for the development of functional water literacy. Studies have begun to emerge that illustrate some of the criteria students consider when making decisions about the resolution of SHI [19], systems thinking they employ [42], and how their personal values inform their reasoning [20]. However, the potential for the SSR construct to provide a concrete means for developing functional water literacy in the context of SHI is underexplored, particularly in undergraduate courses with a direct focus on water.…”

Sociohydrologic Systems Thinking: An Analysis of Undergraduate Students’ Operationalization and Modeling of Coupled Human-Water Systems

“…Students emphasized components more strongly in their diagrammatic models than mechanisms or phenomenon/patterns (Figure 2). When students reason about an SHS, their values and experiences inform their ideas and decisions [5]. Student experiences with water frame, particularly their firsthand experiences, may have directly contributed to the emphasis of components in diagrammatic models.…”

“…Sociohydrologic systems (SHS), are water systems that include both human and natural dimensions. However, research has shown students are challenged by reasoning about both natural and human dimensions of SHS (e.g., [4][5][6][7][8][9]). To support students' systems thinking about SHS, we developed and implemented a new interdisciplinary undergraduate course.…”

The relationship between active learning, course innovation, and teaching Earth systems thinking: A structural equation modeling approach

“…This framework, more so than the other three, is highly contextualized. Examples of work done in this area include studies on student reasoning on real-world systems like coastal eutrophication (Sell et al, 2006;McNeal et al, 2008), ecosystem dynamics (Grotzer et al, 2013;Sutter et al, 2018), soil microbial activity (Appel et al, 2014), and socio-hydrologic systems (Gunckel et al, 2012;Sabel et al, 2017;Forbes et al, 2018;Petitt and Forbes, 2019).…”