Student Decision-Making about a Globally Familiar Socioscientific Issue: The value of sharing and comparing views with international counterparts

Abstract

This paper focuses on the views of 16–17-year-old science students from England, Germany, Hong Kong and Sweden on whale hunting, and their perceptions of the views of their international counterparts. The students were all provided with the same decision-making task, discussed the issue in small groups and then presented their views on video, which were shared with their counterparts. The findings show that the decision-making task served to deepen and modify students' views across all nationalities, and the students generally valued and learned from the sharing of views with students of the same age from around the world. However, an important discovery was that the German students' opinions often ran counter to those from the other 3 locations, and the paper cautions against making broad-sweeping generalisations about students' views on socioscientific issues.

Keywords:

• Socioscientific issues
• Decision-making
• International comparisons
• Comparative study
• Discourse
• Ecology education

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all the schools, teachers and students who took part in this study, and in particular, Claudia Liesenkötter and Nicola Jefferies for giving so generously of their time in helping with the data collection and preliminary evaluation.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.