ABSTRACT

Conventional school science has often portrayed obesity as a self-inflicted problem. It tends to ignore perspectives at the systems level, such as social, political, marketing and economic factors that shape an obesogenic environment that determines individual eating and lifestyle patterns. Therefore, socioscientific decisions (e.g. fat tax) are likely to be biased against the obese and ultimately fail to overcome this global health challenge. Students should examine obesity from multiple perspectives to make informed decisions about it. Based on the concepts of adherence and prevalence in the conceptual change literature, this paper examines students’ learning of multiple perspectives in terms of (i) a change in the number of references to different perspectives in making sense of obesity and (ii) a shift in adherence to and prevalence of different causes of obesity. A total of 114 undergraduate students from a diverse range of major subjects enrolled in a general education course about obesity participated in this study. The course design was guided by an SSI Teaching and Learning model. Pre-/post-course questionnaires, essays, and follow-up interviews were used to chart students’ learning during the 12-week course and 6 months afterwards. The students became more able to explain obesity using perspectives from multiple dimensions. They adhered less strongly to personal-level causes of obesity and more accepting of systems-level perspectives. We conclude by arguing that it is not only important for teachers to enhance the number of perspectives considered by students, but also attend to their differences in weights to facilitate students’ learning of SSI.

摘要

传统的学校科学经常将肥胖描绘成一个自我困扰的问题。它倾向于忽略系统层面的观点，例如社会，政治，市场和经济因素，这些因素塑造了决定个体饮食和生活方式的致肥胖环境。因此，社会科学决策（例如脂肪税）可能偏向肥胖者，最终无法克服这一全球健康挑战。学生应从多个角度检查肥胖症，以做出明智的决定。基于坚持和普遍性的概念在概念变化文献中，本文从以下方面考察了学生对多种观点的学习：（i）肥胖意义上对不同观点的引用数量发生了变化；（ii）对不同原因的坚持和流行的转变肥胖。总共有114名来自不同领域的本科生参加了有关肥胖的通识教育课程，参加了这项研究。课程设计以SSI教学模式为指导。课前/课后的问卷，论文和后续访谈被用来绘制学生在12周课程和之后6个月的学习情况的图表。学生变得更有能力从多个角度来解释肥胖症。他们不太坚决地坚持个人原因造成的肥胖，而更多地接受了系统层面的观点。最后，我们通过争论得出结论，不仅重要的是教师要增加学生考虑的观点的数量，而且要注意他们的权重差异以促进学生学习SSI。