1. Supporting students’ formal decision-making about biofuels
Jenny Dauer, Michelle Lute, Olivia Straka
School of Natural Resources
Acknowledgments: This study was funded by the College of Agricultural Science and Natural Resources at UNL, thank you to Olivia Straka and Ashley Alred for assistance with data analysis.
Introduction
Science education plays a key role in supporting science literacy, or helping students not only understand science content, but also in developing skills required for personal decision-making and participation in civic affairs.
We propose two types of decision-making grounded in social and cognitive psychology (Table 1), and have designed course materials to support students’ formal decision-making about socioscientific issues such as biofuels (Table 2).
Research Goal #2 Describe student thinking about biofuels.
Table 1. Contrasting types of decision-making
Informal decision making
Used to make thousands of decisions on a daily basis
Uses emotive, intuitive and cognitive reasoning
Does not notice uncertainty
Subject to cognitive biases
Based on “value judgments”
Formal decision-making
Most important to use with challenging, ill-structured problems
Uses deliberate, rational and effortful reasoning
Notices uncertainty
Tools are used to reduce cognitive biases
Based on optimizing a suite of values 3.
Classroom Context
We collected data in an introductory core course, Science and Decision-making for a Complex World, required for all freshman, with STEM (2/3rds) and Non-STEM (1/3) majors. The course used socioscientific issues as a means to learning objectives around science-informed decision-making and media literacy.
Research Goal #1 Explore how student values’ play a role in thinking about biofuels.
Value-Belief-Norm theory that predicts a causal chain that moves from stable, central values to beliefs and personal norms and then to behavior (Stern, 2000).
We propose that a connection between values and decisions are more closely aligned during informal decision making when “value judgments” are made based on single values.
In contrast, formal decision-making requires a reasoned evaluation of tradeoffs among multiple values.
RESULTS: Value orientations predict students’ pretest overall position on biofuels, but not their posttest overall position, suggesting that students are more likely to make informal “value judgments” at the beginning of the class.
Table 2. Framework used in the course to support students formal decision-making (after Ratcliffe, 1997)
Define the Problem: What is the crux of the problem as you see it?
Options: What are the options? (List the possible solutions to the problem.)
Criteria: How are you going to choose between these options? (Explain important considerations and what is valued in an outcome.)
Information: Do you have enough information about each option to evaluate based on your criteria? What scientific evidence is involved in this problem? What additional information do you need to help you make the decision?
Analysis: Discuss each option weighed against the criteria. What are the tradeoffs of each option?
Choice: Which option do you choose?
Review: What do you think of the decision you have made? How could you improve the way you made the decision?
Research Goal #3: Document how a course focused on science and formal decision-making influenced students’ quality of personal reasoning about their position on biofuels
RESULTS:
Figure 2. Percent of arguments given within each level of argument quality. There were 133 argument statements Pre, and 145 argument statements Post. The overall pattern of argument quality was not significantly different between Pre and Post.
The increase in level 2 arguments corresponded to students more frequently discussing themes of: 1) using an alternative technology or biofuel feedstock beyond corn ethanol, 2) the food versus fuel debate and 3) the environment or natural resources.
Data collection
Among 53 randomly assigned students we collected the following data:
Pre and Post opinions about biofuels
The text for the biofuels pre/post question included some framing of the problem context, then: 1) What do you think should be done about this problem? Should we burn corn ethanol for energy? 2) Why should we do it/not do it?
Value orientations
We used a likert-scale questions to assess students’ environmental value orientations based on the Value-Belief-Norm (VBN) Theory (Stern, 2000). The scale (De Groot & Steg, 2008) consists of 12 items that measure an individual’s orientation along three sets of beliefs regarding human/nature relationships (i.e., altruistic, biospheric, egoistic). In order to maximize the separation between students’ level of environmental concern, we created a fourth variable, “Bio-Ego,” calculated as the difference between a given students’ biospheric score and egoistic score.
Conclusions
Our results support the idea that value orientations are more likely to predict students’ stances when students are engaging in informal reasoning, and that change in overall stance towards biofuels was influenced by formal decision-making experience in the course.
Students’ personal reasoning quality increased somewhat in terms of more justificatory arguments and less sentimental arguments. After the class students were more likely to consider potential negative environmental and social consequences to biofuels and recommend alternative solutions. This reveals greater student awareness of tradeoffs at the end of the course.
Figure 1. There was a significant change in overall position about biofuels (n=53, χ2= 10.92; p<0.05). Circles include student numbers and mean “Bio-Ego” value orientation scale in italics. Arrow size tracks the number of people who changed stances between pre- and post-surveys, a single line represents one person. The “Bio-Ego” value orientation score predicted overall position of pre-survey stance (Pearson’s Chi-square test: χ2= 77.08; p<0.001) but not post-survey stance.
References
De Groot & Steg (2008) Environment and Behavior, 40(3), 330–354
Kuhn (1997) Cognition and Instruction, 15:
Ratcliffe (1997) Int J of Sci Educ, 19:
Stern (2000) Journal of Social Issues 56: