Water-literate individuals effectively reason about the hydrologic concepts that underlie socio-hydrological issues (SHI), but functional water literacy also requires concomitant reasoning about the societal, non-hydrological aspects of SHI. Therefore, this study explored the potential for the socio-scientific reasoning construct (SSR), which includes consideration of the complexity of issues, the perspectives of stakeholders involved, the need for ongoing inquiry, skepticism about information sources, and the affordances of science toward the resolution of the issue, to aid undergraduates in acquiring such reasoning skills. In this fixed, embedded mixed methods study (N = 91), we found SHI to hold great potential as meaningful contexts for the development of water literacy, and that SSR is a viable and useful construct for better understanding undergraduates’ reasoning about the hydrological and non-hydrological aspects of SHI. The breadth of reasoning sources to which participants referred and the depth of the SSR they exhibited in justifying those sources varied within and between the dimensions of SSR. A number of participants’ SSR was highly limited. Implications for operationalizing, measuring, and describing undergraduate students’ SSR, as well as for supporting its development for use in research and the classroom, are discussed.

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.

Socio-scientific issues (SSI) are informed by science concepts but require consideration of societal aspects in order to be effectively understood and resolved. As a result, functional scientific literacy necessitates fluency with science as well as other domains of knowledge when engaged in reasoning about science and societal dimensions of SSI (i.e., socio-scientific reasoning (SSR)). However, a holistic examination of those domains of knowledge that inform a particular SSI has not been undertaken. In this investigation, thematic analysis is employed to explore domains of knowledge undergraduates (N = 91) used when reasoning about a regionally relevant SSI after completing a semester-long course about contemporary water-related issues. We found that participants used a number of knowledge domains, including science and ethics, as well as domains from the social sciences, though the number and type of knowledge domains differed within and across SSR dimensions. These findings inform SSI research and instruction in the context of SSI, as they begin to make concrete the diversity of knowledge domains with which individuals need familiarity and which must be synthesized to effectively understand and respond to SSI and thus exhibit functional scientific literacy.

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To prepare students to address water-related challenges, undergraduate STEM education must provide them with opportunities to learn and reason about water issues. Water in Society is an introductory-level, innovative, and interdisciplinary undergraduate course offered annually at a large midwestern university. The course focuses on both disciplinary concepts and civic engagement, and is designed around a variety of interactive, research-based practices to support students’ learning, engagement with authentic data, scientific models and modeling, and collaboration and learning among peers. This study aims to evaluate, “how have student outcomes and perceptions changed over five years of the course?”. The results are based on data from students (n = 326) in five consecutive years of the course, during which time the course transitioned from a face-to-face model to fully asynchronous online model due, in part, to impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The particularly rapid and abrupt transition between 2020 and 2021 in response to COVID-19 led to many course changes, including modes of communication between instructors and students and opportunities for collaboration. Here, multiple measures are used to evaluate students’ learning about water concepts, model-based reasoning about socio-hydrologic systems, and perceptions of the course across all five years. By the end of each iteration of the course, students improved their knowledge of hydrologic concepts, independent of the course format or other student-level variables. However, results also show that students’ performance on complex socio-hydrologic systems modeling tasks, as well as their overall satisfaction with the course, decreased in Year 5 when the course was fully online. Results provide insight into efforts to move undergraduate STEM courses online and specific evidence of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impacts on undergraduate STEM teaching and learning about water.