One goal of higher education is to increase citizens’ engagement in civic processes, particularly about challenging issues with ecological components. Socioscientific issues instruction is often proposed as a way to bolster students’ civic engagement, however few studies in science education have explicitly examined this connection. This study was in the context of a large enrollment introductory science college course, Science and Decision-Making for a Complex World, where students used a structured decision-making process to examine alternative policy solutions to complex socioscientific issues with an ecological focus. We collected pre and post instruction responses (n=174) using the Civic Attitudes and Skills Questionnaire (5-point Likert scale). After four modules (prairie dog conservation, food insecurity, biofuels and water conservation in agriculture), students completed a structured decision-making process to use science to understand the potential consequences of alternative actions and perform a trade-off analysis based on their personal priorities. Alternative solutions were normally policy-level solutions, and the “decision” made by students was framed as individual actions that would have societal relevance. We performed qualitative thematic coding to examine students’ responses (n=145) about their perception of the importance of the issue, actions they could take to impact the issue, and the efficacy of those actions.
Results/Conclusions
We found post instruction increases in students’ civic engagement attitudes and skills related to social justice (paired t-test; p<0.1), interpersonal & problem solving skills (p<0.1) and political awareness (p<0.05). We found that students’ ideas about impact and efficacy varied across four different issues due to students’ sense of the issues’ importance and scale. For example, less than 50% of the students thought the prairie dog issue was important, and most (78%) reasoned about indirect actions such as educating others. In contrast, the majority (84%) of students thought the water conservation issue was important and the majority (71%) gave direct actions to make a difference including actions on their family’s farm to reduce irrigation. Therefore, issue topic may have an impact on the connections students make to civic engagement. Generally students’ ideas about actions they could take to impact the issue were narrow and rarely included political actions like voting (< 10% of responses across all issues). Finally, we suggest that socioscientific instruction must have an explicit connection to policy-level decisions and reveal how individual actions can influence societal systems and ultimately ecological systems. Our course using a structured decision-making process is one model to help students make these connections.