The impacts of modelling-based SSI teaching module on preservice teachers’ decision making – a case of Dongfeng Highway route selection

ABSTRACT

The demand for the Dongfeng Highway connecting Dongshi and Fengyuan, Taiwan, originates from a 7.3 ML earthquake disaster affecting residents’ medical treatment and material transportation. The Dongfeng Highway route selection was identified as the socioscientific issues (SSI) and the Decision Factors Table and SageModeler (two representational modelling tools) were used to design a teaching module with two Generation-Evaluation-Modification modelling cycles. This study aims to explore the impacts of the Modelling-based SSI (M-SSI) teaching module on 23 preservice teachers’ (PSTs) plans, factor dimensions, and quality of decision making. The results indicated that the PSTs focused on the original purpose of constructing the Dongfeng Highway; therefore, the Fengshi plan, which has advantages in safety, economy, and ecology, was chosen by most participants. Initially, PSTs focused only on ‘relevance to the topic’ factor and few relationships among other factors. However, they improved their decision quality by focusing on ‘comparability and measurement’ and ‘sufficient evidence or justification’ factors and more vertical relationships among factors after completing the module. Although the PSTs’ horizontal relationships among factors still need to be strengthened, they demonstrated significant increases in factor, relationship, and overall scores with large effect sizes, indicating that the M-SSI teaching module can improve decision quality.

KEYWORDS:

• Decision making
• decision factors table
• highway route selection
• modelling-based socioscientific issue (M-SSI)
• SageModeler

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics statement

This study was reviewed and granted by the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan (MOST 108-2511-H-152-004-MY3). The review concluded that this study did not require submission to further review by the Human Ethics Committee. All participants were more than 20 years old and gave written informed consent to participate and received study results and gift certificates as feedback. All personally identifiable data were anonymised during data collection and publication.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan [MOST 108-2511-H-152-004-MY3].