Support youth as knowledge producers with rigorous intellectual criteria for evaluating their environmental decisions¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 3 claims (3 for) · 1 study (1 qualitative), q2 · 0 of 1 report an effect size · 3 claims rest on one study

Description¶

The article's forward-looking recommendation for CCS education is to design projects that position youth as knowledge producers and to explicitly build their decision-evaluation capacity. Per the abstract, projects should provide "instructional recommendations for CCS projects which position youth as knowledge producers, such as how to support youth in developing rigorous intellectual criteria for evaluating their environmental decisions." The study's findings motivate this: students had systems knowledge but varied values and often lacked action-related knowledge.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Teachers can learn what students value for their intellectual standards so students can critically assess the intellectual merit of their own work

Constraints¶

• Because data do not contain instructions for action, decision support must address values and framing, not only content

Target Learners¶

• elementary students in school-based CCS projects

Target Learning Goals¶

• evaluating environmental decisions
• developing intellectual standards for scientific argumentation

Affordances¶

• Frick Three Knowledge Types Environmental Decisions

Claims¶

• Students' differing values about a campus predator-prey problem produced no agreed definition of the issue and no agreed action [+W]
• Seven of ten focal students explained they could help the birds by expanding their research efforts on campus and beyond [+W]
• Elementary CCS students articulated multiple, varied project purposes, with all students acting toward helping the birds [+W]

Related Strategies¶

• Apply Youth Participatory Action Research principles to school-based citizen science design to support student agency

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Erin Bridges Bird · Heidi L. Ballard · Margaret Harte. (2023). Data to decision-making: how elementary students use their Community and Citizen Science project to reimagine their school campus. Instructional Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-022-09612-6