Complexity in Education for Sustainable Consumption—An Educational Data Mining Approach using Mysteries

Abstract

Systems thinking is one of the skills necessary for sustainable behavior, especially regarding sustainable consumption. Students are faced with complexity and uncertainty while taking part in it and other daily life aspects. There is a need to foster their competence in this field. From a classroom point of view, the mystery method is an example for implementing education for sustainable consumption and working with complex and uncertain content. With the mystery method students construct an influence diagram, which consists of concepts and requires several skills, especially in decision-making. Using these diagrams as a form of assessment is desirable but also very difficult, because of the mentioned complexity and uncertainty that is part of the task itself. The study presented here tackles this problem by creating an expert based reference diagram that has been constructed with the help of educational data mining. The result shows that it is possible to derive such a reference even if parts remain ambiguous due to the inherent complexity. The reference may now be used to assess students’ systems thinking abilities, which will be undertaken in future research. Beside this, the reference can be used as a reflective tool in lessons, so students can compare their own content knowledge and discuss differences to the experts’ reference.

The Mystery Method Reconsidered—A Tool for Assessing Systems Thinking in Education for Sustainable Development

“…In many studies, concept mapping has proven to be a systemic form of representation [20][21][22][23][24]. Structural similarities between concept maps and influence diagrams, which emerge from applying the mystery method as the learning output, suggest that these influence diagrams also can be used for diagnostic purposes [4], because both concept maps and influence diagrams emerge as models of thought from the same process of modeling [25].…”

“…To create learning environments that convey complexity and networking, teachers require an assessment that enables them to provide targeted support. In this article, the application of such an assessment tool, which is an expertise-based reference to the mystery method, or mystery for short [2,3], in a complex sustainability context [4], is presented. The reference will be used as a basis to evaluate learners' influence diagrams qualitatively.…”

“…Concept mapping has been proven highly feasible as a valid assessment of systems thinking. Due to structural similarities between concept maps and the influence diagrams from the mystery method, the influence diagrams are presumed to be suitable for a diagnosis, which can take place in daily teaching practice [4]. Generally, as with concept maps, various methods can be used for evaluation [14,15].…”

“…But can there be a mapped reference if there is no clear solution for such maps? Benninghaus, Mühling, Kremer and Sprenger [4] were able to provide several references that can be used for assessment. To create the references, the authors constructed a mystery within a (non-)sustainable consumption pattern (water-intensive, export-oriented tomato cultivation in Almería, Spain).…”

Science|Environment|Health – the emergence of a new pedagogy of complex living systems

“…Relaxing from generality calls for new approaches to teaching and particularly to assessment in science education. One S|E|H group (Benninghaus, Mühling, Kremer, & Sprenger, 2019) uses the mystery method to visualise student thinking about complex systems. The method was designed to help students to create influence diagrams about systems, i.e., the students receive several information cards with facts and have to connect them to a diagram to visualize influences (Leat & Nichols, 2000).…”