Digital technology to support students’ socioscientific reasoning about environmental issues

Abstract

Scientific expertise and outcomes often give rise to controversy. An educational response that equips students to take part in such discussions is the teaching of socially acute questions (SAQs). With SAQs, the understanding of uncertainty, risk and how knowledge is developed is central. This study explores the way in which students from different disciplines and different continents are brought together via a digital platform to explore SAQs about environmental issues (a green algae outbreak linked to release of fertilisers along the coast of Brittany; the construction of a desalination plant near Melbourne to produce freshwater; and changes in meat consumption on a global scale, with regard to population projections in 2050). We have developed frameworks for looking at the quality of the collective reasoning and at the nature of students' interactions, so that we can analyse the organisation of the learning communities and the building of collegial expertise. The results show that interdisciplinary discussions, especially on an international scale, foster the understanding of complex situations. In this paper, we discuss the modalities of one didactic scenario to enhance critical thinking and collaborative work, and to provide space for learners to support argumentation.

Engaging with socially acute questions: Development and validation of an interactional reasoning framework

“…We also established that, compared to exchanges between within‐country groups, the web‐based exchanges between the Australian and French groups led to significantly greater increases in reasoning (for more details on these findings, see Morin et al, , p 164), and we argue that this was due to the difference between the viewpoints of the groups associated with different contextual exposure to the issue, and differences in underlying cultural presumptions, that had to be negotiated in the web‐based exchanges. We further argue that improvements in reasoning on particular dimensions of the S3R can be associated with aspects of the web‐based exchanges.…”

“…First, we observe in our study (see Figure ) that the majority of exchanges between groups in the forum involved justifications of arguments that refer to Habermas' three worlds. Moreover, following a previous publication of our results (Morin et al, ), Korsager and Jorde () used a similar scenario to ours, involving younger pupils (16–19 years old) from Canada, China, Norway, and Sweden discussing the climate change issue. They also observed that diverse types of knowledges are evident in exploratory talk in the course of construction of wikis, which do not appear in the final wiki.…”

“…Types of national and international interactions of one group of French participants dealing together with the meat consumption issue (Morin et al, ). The horizontal axis follows the activity stages: forum A (within the groups), construction of a first wiki by each group, then international exchanges with forum B and reconstruction of wikis.…”

“…Units of data for this example are individual contributions from French participants of one group during their collaborative work with Australian students. It consists of the French posts on the French digital (Morin et al, 2013). The horizontal axis follows the activity stages: forum A (within the groups), construction of a first wiki by each group, then international exchanges with forum B and reconstruction of wikis.…”

Assessment of scientific literacy: Development and validation of the Quantitative Assessment of Socio-Scientific Reasoning (QuASSR)

“…Simonneaux and Simonneaux (2009) expanded SSR by adding two components: identifying risks/uncertainties and accounting for culture and ethical principles in decision-making (2009). Morin, Simonneaux, Simonneaux, and Tytler (2013) and Morin, Simonneaux, Simonneaux, Tytler, and Barraza (2014) further refined their model by incorporating argumentation and a focus on sustainability. We interpret the expansion of SSR by Simonneaux and Simonneaux (2009) as an attempt to account for greater diversity in student navigation of complex issues.…”