ABSTRACT

Socio-scientific decision-making necessitates reasoning from multiple perspectives and the use of trade-offs. This study examines how students decide on socio-scientific issues when they engage in an instructional intervention to enhance their socio-scientific decision-making towards consensus building that, in this study, emphasises generating solutions to resolve issues. We developed a socio-scientific issue-based unit for non-science undergraduate students focusing on an intervention that enhances their socio-scientific decision-making around issues regarding a genetically modified organism. Our intervention focused on consensus building wherein students identified multiple conflicts among various stakeholders’ opinions and proposed solutions to resolve them. In particular, students considered the trade-offs of science and technology. This paper presents the results from two intervention studies in which 12 and 49 non-science undergraduate students participated. To confirm that the participants of each study achieved the goal of the curriculum unit, we analysed the solutions students collaboratively constructed at the end of the unit (Analysis 1). We then used a pre- and post-intervention approach to assess students’ independent decision-making (Analysis 2). During the curriculum unit, we assigned students an essay-writing task twice and investigated the quality of their decisions. A comparison of the pre- and post-tests revealed a general shift towards higher-level responses after the intervention. Students’ arguments on socio-scientific issues changed from justificatory arguments to proposals for solutions. These findings demonstrated that the instruction promoted students’ socio-scientific decision-making towards consensus building. Finally, we discuss the implications for socio-scientific issue instruction and the evaluation of students’ decision-making as well as provide suggestions for future work.

摘要

社会科学决策需要从多个角度进行推理并进行权衡。本研究考察了学生在参与教学干预以增强他们的社会科学决策以达成共识时如何决定社会科学问题，在本研究中，强调生成解决问题的解决方案。我们为非科学本科生开发了一个基于社会科学问题的单元，重点是一种干预措施，可以增强他们围绕转基因生物问题的社会科学决策。我们的干预侧重于建立共识，学生在其中确定了不同利益相关者意见之间的多重冲突，并提出了解决这些冲突的解决方案。特别是，学生们考虑了科学和技术的权衡。本文介绍了 12 和 49 名非科学本科生参与的两项干预研究的结果。为了确认每项研究的参与者都实现了课程单元的目标，我们分析了学生在单元结束时合作构建的解决方案（分析 1）。然后，我们使用干预前和干预后的方法来评估学生的独立决策（分析 2）。在课程单元中，我们为学生分配了两次论文写作任务，并调查了他们的决定质量。前测和后测的比较显示，干预后普遍向更高水平的反应转变。学生对社会科学问题的争论从正当的争论转变为解决方案的建议。这些发现表明，教学促进了学生的社会科学决策，以建立共识。最后，我们讨论了对社会科学问题教学和学生决策评估的影响，并为未来的工作提供了建议。