Cultivating Water Literacy in STEM Education: Undergraduates’ Socio-Scientific Reasoning about Socio-Hydrologic Issues

Water-literate individuals effectively reason about the hydrologic concepts that underlie socio-hydrological issues (SHI), but functional water literacy also requires concomitant reasoning about the societal, non-hydrological aspects of SHI. Therefore, this study explored the potential for the socio-scientific reasoning construct (SSR), which includes consideration of the complexity of issues, the perspectives of stakeholders involved, the need for ongoing inquiry, skepticism about information sources, and the affordances of science toward the resolution of the issue, to aid undergraduates in acquiring such reasoning skills. In this fixed, embedded mixed methods study (N = 91), we found SHI to hold great potential as meaningful contexts for the development of water literacy, and that SSR is a viable and useful construct for better understanding undergraduates’ reasoning about the hydrological and non-hydrological aspects of SHI. The breadth of reasoning sources to which participants referred and the depth of the SSR they exhibited in justifying those sources varied within and between the dimensions of SSR. A number of participants’ SSR was highly limited. Implications for operationalizing, measuring, and describing undergraduate students’ SSR, as well as for supporting its development for use in research and the classroom, are discussed

Cultivating Water Literacy in Stem Education: Undergraduates\u27 Socio-scientific Reasoning About Socio-hydrologic Issues

Water-literate individuals effectively reason about the hydrologic concepts that underlie socio-hydrological issues (SHI), but functional water literacy also requires concomitant reasoning about the societal, non-hydrological aspects of SHI. Therefore, this study explored the potential for the socio-scientific reasoning construct (SSR), which includes consideration of the complexity of issues, the perspectives of stakeholders involved, the need for ongoing inquiry, skepticism about information sources, and the affordances of science toward the resolution of the issue, to aid undergraduates in acquiring such reasoning skills. In this fixed, embedded mixed methods study (N = 91), we found SHI to hold great potential as meaningful contexts for the development of water literacy, and that SSR is a viable and useful construct for better understanding undergraduates’ reasoning about the hydrological and non-hydrological aspects of SHI. The breadth of reasoning sources to which participants referred and the depth of the SSR they exhibited in justifying those sources varied within and between the dimensions of SSR. A number of participants’ SSR was highly limited. Implications for operationalizing, measuring, and describing undergraduate students’ SSR, as well as for supporting its development for use in research and the classroom, are discussed

Cultivating Water Literacy in STEM Education: Undergraduates’ Socio-Scientific Reasoning about Socio-Hydrologic Issues

Water-literate individuals effectively reason about the hydrologic concepts that underlie socio-hydrological issues (SHI), but functional water literacy also requires concomitant reasoning about the societal, non-hydrological aspects of SHI. Therefore, this study explored the potential for the socio-scientific reasoning construct (SSR), which includes consideration of the complexity of issues, the perspectives of stakeholders involved, the need for ongoing inquiry, skepticism about information sources, and the affordances of science toward the resolution of the issue, to aid undergraduates in acquiring such reasoning skills. In this fixed, embedded mixed methods study (N = 91), we found SHI to hold great potential as meaningful contexts for the development of water literacy, and that SSR is a viable and useful construct for better understanding undergraduates’ reasoning about the hydrological and non-hydrological aspects of SHI. The breadth of reasoning sources to which participants referred and the depth of the SSR they exhibited in justifying those sources varied within and between the dimensions of SSR. A number of participants’ SSR was highly limited. Implications for operationalizing, measuring, and describing undergraduate students’ SSR, as well as for supporting its development for use in research and the classroom, are discussed

Students\u27 Socio-hydrological Reasoning and Water Literacy in an Undergraduate Water Course

Presentation given at the 2019 Earth Educators’ Rendezvous. In a world that is becoming increasingly globalized and resource-limited, it is essential to support students\u27 development of sophisticated reasoning skills when dealing with complex Earth systems. To address this need, we developed, implemented, and studied an introductory, interdisciplinary, 1-semester undergraduate course focused on socio-hydrologic systems. Here, we present results investigating undergraduate students\u27 (n=92) socio-hydrological reasoning through the use of a pre-/post-course concept inventory and course assignment grounded in a real-world, regionally-relevant water quality issue. We found students\u27 knowledge of core hydrology concepts increased significantly over the semester. Additionally, analysis of students\u27 responses to a 5-item Quantitative Analysis of Socio-Scientific Reasoning (QuASSR) indicated a wide range of sophistication across and within the dimensions of SSR. A deductive analysis included the evaluation of students\u27 responses to the QuASSR items using a rubric to evaluate the sophistication for each dimension of SSR (i.e., complexity, inquiry, perspective-taking, skepticism, and the affordances of science). Seventy-three % of students earned the maximum score for their perspective-taking responses by elaborating on two perspectives that might be taken by scenario stakeholders (ie: farmers and urban residents), whereas nearly half of students\u27 skepticism responses failed to include reasoning as to how nitrate levels from the same site might be reported differently by scientists hired by different stakeholder groups. An inductive, thematic analysis was also employed to provide a richer account of the students\u27 SSR. Students\u27 offered a variety of ways that science could contribute to the resolution of this SSI, including by investigating problems, developing solutions, monitoring sites, and communicating knowledge. Here we provide evidence that using effective geoscience education approaches (ie: teaching content knowledge and overcoming misconceptions) coupled with socio-hydrological issues provide students with a productive context in which to develop water literacy

Exploring Undergraduates’ Breadth of Socio-scientific Reasoning Through Domains of Knowledge

Socio-scientific issues (SSI) are informed by science concepts but require consideration of societal aspects in order to be effectively understood and resolved. As a result, functional scientific literacy necessitates fluency with science as well as other domains of knowledge when engaged in reasoning about science and societal dimensions of SSI (i.e., socio-scientific reasoning (SSR)). However, a holistic examination of those domains of knowledge that inform a particular SSI has not been undertaken. In this investigation, thematic analysis is employed to explore domains of knowledge undergraduates (N = 91) used when reasoning about a regionally relevant SSI after completing a semester-long course about contemporary water-related issues. We found that participants used a number of knowledge domains, including science and ethics, as well as domains from the social sciences, though the number and type of knowledge domains differed within and across SSR dimensions. These findings inform SSI research and instruction in the context of SSI, as they begin to make concrete the diversity of knowledge domains with which individuals need familiarity and which must be synthesized to effectively understand and respond to SSI and thus exhibit functional scientific literacy

Cultivating Water Literacy in Undergraduate STEM Education: Students\u27 Socio-Scientific Reasoning about Socio-hydrologic Issues

Paper presented at National Association for Research in Science Teaching International Conference. Progra