Can Reading Questions Foster Active Learning? A Study of Six College Courses

Many instructors strive to encourage student reading outside of class and active learning in class. One pedagogical tool, structured reading questions, can help do both. Using examples from question sets across six courses, the authors illustrate how reading questions can help students achieve the six active-learning principles described by Svinicki (1991). Qualitative and quantitative assessment data indicate that students often complete readings before class, that they view the questions as very helpful in their learning, and that they use the questions primarily to help understand what information is important and connect it to prior knowledge. Some differences in use are evident across class standing

Collaboration for sustainability? A framework for analyzing government impacts in collaborative-environmental management

Citizen participation and empowerment are critical sustainability elements. One increasingly popular form of citizen participation is collaborative-environmental management (CEM). This approach has been described as a new way of governing for environmental issues, an alternative to government-centered processes, that empowers stakeholders and citizens to play a dominant role in planning and decision making. This paper describes a new analytical framework, called the Governmental Impact Framework, for understanding how government affects CEM and the sustainability of outcomes. This framework incorporates institutional analysis to illuminate government-stakeholder relationships and the interplay of biophysical and social factors. Applying the framework to a collaborative land-use planning case in the American state of Ohio indicates that governments are more dominant in collaborative processes than previously thought, and that the channels of influence vary along several dimensions

Locating Power in Ostrom’s Design Principles: Watershed Management in India and the United States

© 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Ostrom’s design principles are considered to characterize robust institutions for managing common-pool resources. However, the design principles can conceal and perpetuate power asymmetries to limit socially just outcomes, even while improving environmental outcomes. This study integrates theories on power with Ostrom’s design principles to examine power dynamics in watershed management groups in India and the United States through case study methods. Results reveal that power does not always manifest itself in an environment of injustice, but processes of domination and empowerment occur concurrently. Negative aspects of power are not manifested through overt conflict, but through non-participation, inaction, and silence of non-dominant actors. This is not to say that non-dominant actors are devoid of agency, as they may respond to domination through solidarities and building capabilities. Paying attention to these interdependencies can shed light on the potential for collective action for achieving not only environmentally sustainable but also socially just outcomes

Breaking the cycle: Producer and consumer perspectives on the non-adoption of passive solar housing in the US

Creating the technologies to solve our energy and pollution problems is only one part of the solution. Getting the technologies adopted may be a larger hurdle. This study examines the adoption of a low- or no-cost technology, passive solar housing design, in the United States. Interviews with professionals involved in passive solar supply identified lack of demand as the most important factor, followed by availability, awareness, and economic incentives. Corresponding survey results from homebuyers in one region suggest that lack of demand represents not disinterest, but rather lack of availability when purchasing a home. Conventional homeowners are not familiar with passive solar design, but are predisposed to favor it, especially if it can be incorporated into traditional housing styles. In addition, to the extent that they can learn information to counter the perceptions that passive solar homes are too complicated or there is too little sun in their region, homebuyers would be more willing to purchase a passive solar home. Policy interventions to promote passive solar homes should focus on supply-side incentives as well as information for homebuyers.

Systematic learning in water governance: insights from five local adaptive management projects for water quality innovation

Adaptive management has been proliferating since the 1970s as a policy approach for dealing with uncertainty in environmental governance through learning. Learning takes place through a cyclical approach of experimentation and (possible) adjustment. However, few empirical studies exist that cover full iterations of adaptive management cycles. We report on five adaptive management projects on water quality enhancement, of which four led to innovations in the small-scale management of waterways in northern Germany. We trace processes as well as outcomes, to identify factors affecting learning, environmental improvement, and the successful delivery of a project throughout a management cycle. Our findings point to a key difference between two kinds of uncertainty in the studied processes: ecological uncertainty (whether and how interventions will be effective in improving water quality) and what we term "social uncertainty" (how stakeholders will respond to interventions). We find that those managers performed better who addressed both kinds of uncertainty. Factors for dealing with social uncertainties were usually rather different than the ones linked to knowledge gain for the results in the rivers, and their acknowledgment was decisive for successful project delivery. On a conceptual level, our findings suggest that the model of a dual feedback cycle, including both types of uncertainties, allows for more clear-cut conceptual differentiation and empirical outcome measurement of adaptive management processes

Assessing Collaborative Conservation: A Case Survey of Output, Outcome, and Impact Measures Used in the Empirical Literature

Much existing research on collaborative conservation has focused on process, even as researchers have called for greater attention to explaining what results these processes yield. It is time to take stock of collaborative conservation research by mapping what kinds of variables researchers are including in analyses. Here we conduct a case survey from the SCAPE database of environmental decision-making cases. We include cases involving collaboration across government, environmental protection, and resource exploitation interests in western democratic countries. Results reveal patterns in what researchers include in their outputs, outcomes, and impacts measures of collaborative conservation. While there is little difference by publication type (peer-reviewed journals, scholarly book chapters, or gray literature) or over time, we find significant differences in explicit measures across variable types. In particular, variables more proximate to process in a logic chain are more often measured, as are social rather than ecological variables