Fundamental to the well-being of society is sustainably utilizing ecological goods and services, which necessitates the recognition of tradeoffs when making decisions about socio-ecological issues. Ecology educators play a pivotal role in relating the human-environment interactions that inform these tradeoffs and can encourage students to consider tradeoffs amongst their values to make meaningful decisions about ecological issues in their civic lives. Previous studies have shown students struggle with engaging in tradeoffs amongst conflicting objectives in their decision-making processes, often avoiding tradeoffs or basing decisions on one objective without considering all the objectives they value. Few studies have characterized students’ decision-making practices like tradeoffs strategies during classroom activities. By purposely characterizing how students engage in tradeoffs analysis during their decision-making processes about socio-ecological issues, educators can identify instructional strategies that address student challenges to make decision-making meaningful. A large, multidisciplinary science literacy class employs a structured decision-making (SDM) tool that encourages undergraduates to critically analyze multiple solutions to socio-ecological issues using various sources of scientific information to determine the consequences of alternatives, and purposely engage in a tradeoffs analysis to make a high quality decision. In this preliminary study, we qualitatively explored how students (nstudents = 11) engage with tradeoffs in their explanations (nresponses = 66) about the potential consequences of multiple alternatives in satisfying given objectives as they worked through the SDM tool to solve a water conservation issue in fall 2018.
Results/Conclusions
We found that 81% of students were inclined to support the same alternative solution before and after working through the SDM tool, suggesting that an SDM process focusing on tradeoffs analysis may not have been meaningful in their ultimate decision. However, 80% of students did report both positive and negative aspects (i.e. tradeoffs) at least once when explaining how the multiple alternatives satisfied the objectives (30% of total responses). Similarly, for the most preferred alternative solution, 72% of students described tradeoffs at least once. Interestingly, only 24% of students’ responses had evidence to support their claims. Through this work, we developed a framework that described students’ levels of proficiency in addressing tradeoffs in their explanations. Frameworks like these may aid ecology educators in recognizing how students consider tradeoffs when decision-making about socio-ecological issues, as well as identifying challenges to refine educational programming aimed at enhancing students’ decision-making skills.