Supporting Students' Critical Evaluation of Evidence in Socioscientific Issues Contexts

University Of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln NE

Investigators

Abstract

This project aims to serve the national interest by improving students' ability to understand, evaluate, and address complex social problems and issues. A fundamental goal of STEM education is science literacy, or empowering people to make informed decisions about challenging real-world issues. Science literacy necessitates that individuals and groups understand and use scientific evidence in the process of problem-solving and decision-making about complex issues. This community-level science literacy can be supported in classrooms, and requires building skills such as collaboratively discussing ideas, making sense of scientific evidence to reach a conclusion, and reaching a consensus on solutions to complex environmental, medical, and technological social problems. The goal of this project is to produce instructional tools that effectively engage students in collaborative evaluation of scientific evidence to address and consider solutions to socioscientific issues (SSIs). This project plans to develop and refine these instructional tools in the context of an undergraduate science literacy course in which students work collaboratively to evaluate scientific evidence to address SSIs. The research team will work with students to create strategies that support effective evaluation of evidence in SSIs. These strategies will then be implemented in the science literacy course and in a chemistry course to assess the their effectiveness in different course contexts. Ideally, these instructional tools will be refined for wide distribution and use across STEM courses. Ultimately, this work has potential to lead to a greater understanding of how undergraduate students collectively reason through evidence when considering possible solutions to complex SSIs. The project will lean on theories of social constructivism and situated cognition, and educational psychology and science education literature on classroom discourse and argumentation, to perform foundational, design-based research using qualitative and quantitative data. The project plans to describe challenges students face in critical evaluation of evidence during community deliberation and to assess teaching tools that support proficiency of this practice. This project will address two research questions: (1) What are effective strategies for community deliberation (e.g., discourse patterns and critical questions), when evaluating evidence to solve an SSI problem? (2) Do instructional activities based on co-created strategies for improved community deliberation (e.g., critical questions) impact students’ ability as individuals and groups to apply scientific evidence in an SSI decision-making context? The research team will track the evidence-evaluation progress of several teams of students in the science literacy course and perform clinical group interviews that will simultaneously allow researchers to describe proficiencies in group discourse and develop strategies for improved group deliberation in subsequent course assignments (e.g., critical questions that improve group sense-making). These strategies, co-created by students and researchers during the interviews, will be evaluated for their impact within the interdisciplinary science literacy course during design-based research. The project will also translate and evaluate the strategies in a disciplinary chemistry course context. The proposed work is intended to provide a fundamental understanding of how undergraduate students reason during evidence evaluation in the context of decision-making about complex SSIs. This work will be foundational for future research on models for student learning and teaching about evidence evaluation, particularly in large post-secondary classrooms, and will support long-term goals to understand the role of science education in supporting science literacy practices. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.