Given the diversity of knowledge required to generate environmental solutions, there is particular emphasis on integration across disciplines (social and natural sciences) in undergraduate and graduate education (Hawthorne and Wei 2016). The Ecological Society of America has recently endorsed the Four-Dimensional Ecology Education (4DEE) framework (Klemow et al. 2019), which highlights Human-Environment Interactions as a key dimension for ecological education. Given the importance of teaching students to integrate across the social and ecological sciences, we ask; how do students currently use and integrate knowledge generated these by these two disciplines in practice? We investigate this question in a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE), where conceptual modeling underpinned instruction and assessment, whose focus was the socio-ecological drivers of Swift Fox (Vulpes velox) population decline. Model composition in terms of number of components (use) and accuracy of the relationships between components (integration) were used as the measures discipline-specific knowledge use and integration. Student models were scored against an expert-generated target model. Components and relationships within the expert model were characterized as representing knowledge from the social or natural sciences and a qualitative coding rubric was developed by the authors. A paired t-test was used to investigate for differences in number of components represented from each discipline across student models. Accuracy was characterized descriptively as the average number of relationships that met each score on the proficiency scale between disciplines.
Results/Conclusions
There was no significant difference in the number of components representing each discipline for three of the four models students created. Looking at accuracy of use we see divergence emerge. In their first models, on average, students were able to accurately model 4% of the relationships that represented knowledge from the social sciences and 11% of the relationships that represented knowledge from the natural sciences. However, in the final models on average, students were only able to accurately model 28% of the relationships that represented knowledge from the social sciences, whereas they were able to fully accurately model 62% of the relationships that represented knowledge from the natural sciences. This finding suggests that students may try to apply the knowledge generated by each discipline equally in practice, but need greater pedagogical support in integrating knowledge generated by the social sciences in a socio-ecological systems context.