Balancing broad ideas with context:an evaluation of student accuracy indescribing ecosystem processesafter a system-level intervention

Abstract

Promoting student understanding of ecosystem processes is critical to biological education. Yet, teaching complexlife systems can be difficult because systems are dynamic and often behave in a non-linear manner. In thispaper, we discuss assessment results from a middle school classroom intervention in which a conceptual representationframework is embedded in a suite of technology tools. We use both hand-drawn models and openendedwritten responses to evaluate student understanding. While we speculated that our intervention wouldhelp students use ecosystem mechanisms to describe broader processes, we found instead that students tended toexpress constructs in isolation (as opposed to a unified picture of ecosystem processes). In addition, studentsprovided greater elaboration of ideas mostly when specifically prompted. Specific prompts also tended to producemore accurate representations of the ecosystem processes our curriculum covered. Our findings haveallowed us to refine our intervention to better translate these critical concepts, and how they are interrelated,to young learners. As such, these findings have important implications for encouraging broader ecosystemthinking in K-12 classrooms