Not availableDisponibile anche nella versione italiana con il titolo: Conoscere, sapere, comprendere, partecipare: i livelli conoscitivi degli studenti

Avveduto, Sveva

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Cognition, knowledge, understanding, participation: 
students’ cognitive levels
Sveva avveduto
in archaic peasant societies contact with the natural elements 
was more direct and the locus of education was the family work-
shop: that was the school and the main question was the transmis-
sion of knowledge. only very few privileged people had access to 
schooling. this framework remained unchanged up to the begin-
ning of the industrial age, and the weight of new things to learn 
compared with acquired notions to be passed on was low. it was a 
stage when education and learning were oriented to the past.
a clean break happened with tocqueville onwards, when so-
cieties began looking at the present instead of the past. the great 
change began in the 20th century, between the development of the 
industrial societies and the thrust of globalisation, which caused 
the intermingling of social, cultural, scientific, economic, indus-
trial and political lives, and of everyone with everybody else.
nature became a distant boundary that could be manipulated, 
the reality was that of biofacts, of biological products that could 
be and were manipulated, mixing artefacts from different realms 
that used to be very distinct. in these kinds of societies, oriented 
towards the future rather than the present and defined as Post-
Modern according to Lyotard’s now overused expression, educa-
tion must anticipate – not follow – innovation or at least foresee 
innovation and anticipate its social impact and results. We happen 
to live in this kind of society and the school-science-society rela-
tionship must be and does become complete and complex.
and this is where the concepts of knowledge and awareness 
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also come in to the picture, according to the way they have been 
used for many years in the activities of the cnr project entitled 
Perception and Awareness of Science.
In order to define these concepts in relation to their meaning 
connected to science we have to refer to a vast literature previous-
ly examined in another similar setting (avveduto, 2006), which is 
here only just mentioned in passing to define the initial concepts 
of knowledge, rendered as ‘conoscenza’ in italian and awareness, 
usually translated as ‘consapevolezza’, which interest us so much 
since they are fused in the knowledge-awareness combination that 
ends up being broadly connected both to the behavioural area and 
to the skills area which, in this case, combine skill and competence. 
The need to investigate in this field is triggered precisely by the 
possibility of investigating the underlying skills and competences 
present before and after the impact of the Perception and Awareness 
of Science project.
this project does not follow the approach of the many surveys 
on the public understanding of science that also measured pub-
lic levels of understanding and are still carried out, although to a 
lesser degree. We are interested in measuring the students’ level of 
understanding since it is a measure of their interest and involve-
ment but especially since it is correlated to the experiences of par-
ticipative communication in which they took part.
Using Bauer’s tripartition (Bauer et al., 2000) of the instruments 
and methods to measure the public understanding of science, i.e. 
interest in science, understanding of science and attitudes towards 
science, we dealt with the third possibility regarding the aspects 
relative to awareness/participation, leaving aside those of mere 
understanding, as previously understood.
However, in the surveys conducted on the water crisis and on 
climate and the greenhouse effect we tested the students’ knowl-
edge correlating it to the area linked to themes of knowledge and 
awareness by means of a few specific questions. The questions we 
asked the students in order to examine their specific knowledge 
in this field were very limited due to our interest not so much in 
measuring previous knowledge but in activating a system of an-
swers to another kind of questions. However, with the obvious ca-
veat, it is thus possible to correlate the greater or lesser knowledge 
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of the specific topic treated in the project/process of communica-
tion and perception of science with other significant indicators. In-
deed, even our survey data shows that knowledge level does not 
invalidate interest levels.
Students were asked to reply to questions on topics that they 
would later study in class with their teachers and, subsequently, by 
taking part in the public debate.
in most cases, students showed quite a satisfactory knowledge 
level, replying correctly to most of the questions asked. However, 
when we went into detail we noticed some interesting gaps that 
we will examine hereunder.
as regards topics concerning the water crisis, students were 
presented with a range of questions covering the whole spectrum 
of the problem, from the effect of atmospheric agents to the impact 
of anthropic activities, to test their previous knowledge.
Students replied to the four questions posed to them with the 
values reported in table 1.
Table 1. Previous knowledge of the water crisis. 
Statements of the sample on the truth of certain propositions. 
Total percentage values and values by gender.
true false
the water crisis is caused exclusively by low precipitations 11.3 88.7
males 13.8 86.2
females 6.5 96.5
only the southern regions have been hit by the water crisis 23.5 76.5
males 25.0 75.0
females 20,6 79.4
it is impossible to predict the beginning of a water crisis 27.6 72.4
males 28.1 71.9
females 27.2 72.8
agriculture requires considerable amounts of water 95.0 4.0
males 95.8 4.2
females 97.2 2.8
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there was greater uncertainty on some propositions and we 
asked ourselves what made these answers more difficult to give. 
For example, the conviction in 23% of the sample that water prob-
lems only concerned Southern italy might have been caused by the 
contingent concomitance of a catastrophic event in the South or 
by the widespread perception that Southern regions, which are al-
ways perceived as more fraught with difficulties, suffered greater 
problems also in this case.
a high degree of uncertainty was also measured regarding the 
possibility of forecasting events. Many students did not believe it 
possible to foretell when water crises would happen, which might 
be a sign that the culture of emergency still prevails over that of 
prevention.
as the data show, female students systematically gave more 
correct answers than male students, with considerable margins of 
up to eight percentage points.
the questionnaire on climate topics and the greenhouse effect 
gave students three possible alternatives to use as a reference to 
highlight the knowledge level of the topics treated. two were of a 
decidedly scientific nature and one was tied to general information 
on the topic. Students were asked to give their opinion on the ef-
fect of the excessive concentration of co2 in the atmosphere, on the 
effect of the reduction of the ozone layer in the stratosphere and, 
finally, on the contents of the Kyoto Protocol.
the students’ overall knowledge should be considered good, 
altogether better than their knowledge of the water crisis in the 
survey. nevertheless, while answers to science questions were 
quite satisfactory, we noticed greater gaps on the information front: 
12.5% of the students ignored the reference terms of the Kyoto pro-
tocol, despite the fact that, for quite a few years now, it has been 
possible to find popular articles, documentaries and information 
sources of various kinds in the various media.
in this survey male students showed greater competence than 
female students, and their answers are prevalently more correct 
than the ones of the female students (table 2).
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Table 2. Previous knowledge on the topics of climate 
and the greenhouse effect. Statements of the sample on the truth 
of certain propositions. 
Total percentage values and values by gender.
true false
an excessive concentration of co2 in the atmosphere 
is responsible for a concentrated increase in global 
temperatures
90.2 9.8
males 94.0 6.0
females 85.6 14.4
the reduction of the ozone layer in the stratosphere 
protects the earth from the sun’s ultraviolet rays
8.2 91.8
males 5.5 94.5
females 10.7 89.3
the Kyoto protocol is an international agreement 
regulating trade among far eastern states
12.5 87.5
males 10.2 89.8
females 15.6 84.4
although, as we have already mentioned, our activities did not 
intend to measure the degree of knowledge but to ask questions of 
a cognitive nature in the broader framework of the participative 
processes that come into play, we considered it interesting to ask 
the same questions to the students once the participative process 
itself was over, that is, after the public conference-debate and at 
the end of the process of debate and learning in the classroom with 
their teachers.
the students’ answers to the questionnaires administered at the 
end of the process show that 78.6% of the students believed they 
had gained greater knowledge than what they had at the begin-
ning. Faced with the same questions they had answered months 
before, at the start of the various activities of the project, the situ-
ation seemed somewhat changed. For example, concerning the 
initiative on climate, the knowledge gap relative to the Kyoto pro-
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tocol had been bridged and the students were able to place it ac-
cording to its correct contents in 94.9% of the cases (vs the previ-
ous 87.5%). Knowledge on co2 concentration had also improved 
(94.2% of correct answers vs the previous 90.2%), while the rate 
of correct answers to the question on the role of the ozone layer 
in the stratosphere had decreased (89.1% vs the previous 91.8%). 
that approx. 22% of students who expressed a negative opinion on 
the opportunities they had had to acquire new knowledge, overall 
overestimated their knowledge gaps. While there were no signifi-
cant gender differences in the overall perception, females seemed 
to have improved the most in their replies to the questions, with 
over 90% of them answering each of the three questions correctly 
(95.6% for co2 concentration, 93.7% for ozone, 96.4% for Kyoto).
the students’ perception of their increased knowledge on the 
questions relative to the water crisis was more positive, with 85.3% 
believing they had acquired greater knowledge at the end of the 
entire course of the project. Females were less sure (80.6%) and 
males were surer (86.5%). in checking the correctness of the an-
swers given after the whole participative process we noted that 
knowledge had undoubtedly improved except in one area, i.e. pre-
vious information on the causes of the water crisis.
Final conclusions
As previously pointed out, no didactic or defining intent was 
behind the introduction in the survey of a small part of the ques-
tionnaire aimed at testing the students’ degree of knowledge on 
the topics dealt with in the project. as in the previous editions, 
we deemed it useful and appropriate to continue including an ex-
plorative area, the decidedly cognitive one, following the model of 
knowledge quizzes. Some authors believe that individual exercises 
and quizzes are an important research area in e-learning studies 
(Brusilovsky, Miller, 2001). Many agree on the importance – if not 
of a self-assessment proper – of transferring judgement on compe-
tences from outside the classroom to inside it. indeed, this is the 
opinion emerging from one of the final recommendations that the 
US committee on the Foundations of assessment and the US na-
90 91
tional research council considered it useful to draft at the end of a 
laborious study activity (pellegrino et al., 2001). 
the topics treated in the course of the two editions of the Percep-
tion and Awareness of Science project, taken into consideration here, 
have two characteristics in common: the multidisciplinary nature 
of the approach to knowledge, which ranges from physics to geol-
ogy, to chemistry and so on, and the considerable diffusion and 
media impact of the recent events linked both to the water crisis 
and to climate change. therefore the students, both on the school 
front and in the area of information and widespread knowledge, 
were in a favourable condition to be able to have available signifi-
cant previous knowledge. indeed, their conformity was relatively 
good, although their naivety and uncertainty on topics that were 
considered to be common knowledge are surprising.
From the point of view of a greater participation and aware-
ness of choices as opposed to a one-way communication from the 
experts to the citizens, even mere knowledge aspects take on con-
siderable importance. a correct, conscious participation cannot be 
separated from a high level of knowledge and culture, otherwise 
a problematic inability to really influence choices will come about.
Bibliographical references 
aVVeduto S., Conoscenza e consapevolezza della scienza, in Valente 
a. (ed), La scienza dagli esperti ai giovani e ritorno / Science: from special-
ists to students and back again, roma, Biblink, 2006
Bauer W., petKoVa K., BoyadJieVa p., Public knowledge of and at-
titudes to science: Alternative measures that may end the “Science War”, 
in “Science, technology and Human Values”, 25, 1, 2000 
BrusiloVsKy p., Miller p., Course Delivery Systems for the Virtual 
University, in tschanG t., della senta t. (eds), Access to Knowledge: 
New Information Technologies and the Emergence of the Virtual Univer-
sity, amsterdam, elsevier Science, 2001
92 93
lyotard J.F., La condition post-moderne, Rapport sur le savoir, paris, 
Minuit, 1994
pelleGrino J.W., chudowsKy n., Glaser r., Knowing what Stu-
dents Know. The Science and Design of Educational Assessment, Wash-
ington, national academies press, 2001 


Cognition, knowledge, understanding, participation: student\u27s cognitive levels

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Cognition, knowledge, understanding, participation: student\u27s cognitive levels

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