Alignment among environmental programs in higher education: What Food-Energy-Water Nexus concepts are covered in introductory courses?

Horne, Lydia; Manzanares, Amanda; Babin, Nicholas; Royse, Emily A.; Arakawa, Lee; Blavascunas, Eunice; Doner, Lisa A.; Druckenbrod, Daniel L.; Fairchild, Ennea; Jarchow, Meghann; Muchnick, Barry Ross; Panday, P. K.; Perry, Denielle M.; Thomas, Rebecca; Toomey, Anne; Tucker, Brian H.; Washington-Ottombre, Camille; Vincent, Shirley; Anderson, Steven W.; Romulo, Chelsie

doi:10.1080/10899995.2023.2187680

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 48 publications

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“…Drawing on insights gleaned from our prior investigations, which entailed content analysis of eight college-level introductory environmental course syllabi (Horne et al, 2023) and interviews with undergraduate students probing their knowledge of natural environment and ecological topics (Manzanares et al, under review), we consolidated concepts associated with the FEW Nexus as focal themes in our CR assessments. These CR assessments prompted students to articulate their ideas and facilitate the evaluation of their systems thinking and application ability in practical scenarios centered on the FEW Nexus.…”

Section: Rationale and Prior Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extending a Pretrained Language Model (BERT) using an Ontological Perspective to Classify Students’ Scientific Expertise Level from Written Responses

Wang,

Haudek,

Manzanares

et al. 2024

Preprint

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The complex and interdisciplinary nature of scientific concepts presents formidable challenges for students in developing their knowledge-in-use skills. The utilization of computerized analysis for evaluating students’ contextualized constructed responses offers a potential avenue for educators to develop personalized and scalable interventions, thus supporting the teaching and learning of science consistent with contemporary calls. While prior research in artificial intelligence has demonstrated the effectiveness of algorithms, including Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), in tasks like automated classifications of constructed responses, these efforts have predominantly leaned towards text-level features, often overlooking the exploration of conceptual ideas embedded in students’ responses from a cognitive perspective. Despite BERT’s performance in downstream tasks, challenges may arise in domain-specific tasks, particularly in establishing knowledge connections between specialized and open domains. These challenges become pronounced in small-scale and imbalanced educational datasets, where the available information for fine-tuning is frequently inadequate to capture task-specific nuances and contextual details. The primary objective of the present study is to investigate the effectiveness of a pretrained language model (BERT), when integrated with an ontological framework aligned with a contextualized science assessment, in classifying students’ expertise levels in scientific explanation. Our findings indicate that while pretrained language models such as BERT contribute to enhanced performance in language-related tasks within educational contexts, the incorporation of identifying domain-specific terms and extracting and substituting with their associated sibling terms in sentences through ontology-based systems can significantly improve classification model performance. Further, we qualitatively examined student responses and found that, as expected, the ontology framework identified and substituted key domain specific terms in student responses that led to more accurate predictive scores. The study explores the practical implementation of ontology in assessment evaluation to facilitate formative assessment and formulate instructional strategies.

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Section: Rationale and Prior Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extending a Pretrained Language Model (BERT) using an Ontological Perspective to Classify Students’ Scientific Expertise Level from Written Responses

Wang,

Haudek,

Manzanares

et al. 2024

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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An exploratory study of drawings as a tool to evaluate student understanding of the Food-Energy-Water (FEW) Nexus

Horne,

Manzanares,

Atalan-Helicke

et al. 2024

J Environ Stud Sci

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As future decision-makers, students must develop interdisciplinary, systems thinking skills to make effective management decisions; however, systems thinking remains challenging for many students. Here, we use the Food-Energy-Water (FEW) Nexus as a framework to examine how drawings can help students cultivate systems thinking skills. Drawings can be tools to make implicit mental models of systems connections explicit for instructors to better comprehend student learning. Our goal was to understand how drawing can help students make connections across systems compared to using only verbal explanations. In 2021, we interviewed undergraduates, asking them to draw and verbally explain the FEW Nexus. Analysis revealed that student drawings showed an increase in the number of connections that half of students could describe when compared to verbal-only explanations. Instructors may benefit from this study by recognizing areas where students might struggle to understand FEW Nexus connections, where additional course emphasis is needed, and how drawings can help assess student learning.

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Towards context-independent indicators for an unbiased assessment of environmental sustainability in higher education: An application to Italian universities

Boiocchi,

Adami,

Rada

et al. 2024

Journal of Environmental Management

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Alignment among environmental programs in higher education: What Food-Energy-Water Nexus concepts are covered in introductory courses?

Cited by 4 publications

References 48 publications

Extending a Pretrained Language Model (BERT) using an Ontological Perspective to Classify Students’ Scientific Expertise Level from Written Responses

Extending a Pretrained Language Model (BERT) using an Ontological Perspective to Classify Students’ Scientific Expertise Level from Written Responses

An exploratory study of drawings as a tool to evaluate student understanding of the Food-Energy-Water (FEW) Nexus

Towards context-independent indicators for an unbiased assessment of environmental sustainability in higher education: An application to Italian universities

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