COS 27-9
A learning progression for community ecology: How students develop systems thinking

Tuesday, August 12, 2014: 10:50 AM
Regency Blrm D, Hyatt Regency Hotel
Laurel M. Hartley, Biology, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, CO
Charles W. Anderson, College of Education, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI
Alan Berkowitz, Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Millbrook, NY
Jennifer H. Doherty, College of Education, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI
Cornelia Harris, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Millbrook, NY
John Moore, Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO
Background/Question/Methods

Our goal is to develop a learning progression framework and assessments to describe how grade 6-14 students reason about the composition and function of ecological communities.  Our work will lead to recommendations for how to prepare students to make important citizenship decisions related to ecological change at local to global scales. This work is challenging for two reasons.  First, ecosystems are complex systems governed by a large variety of principles that vary in their importance depending on ecosystem context.  Secondly, many students either don’t have enough experiences with the natural world to draw from or their experiences are highly geographically constrained. We administered written assessment items to grade 6-12 students (n = 3393) in five states before and after their participation in a two-week long teaching unit about biodiversity in a stream food web and to attendees of the 2013 Ecological Society of America meeting. We also administered semi-structured interviews about ecological scenarios (n=46 grade 6-12 students, 3 undergraduates, and 4 post-doctoral researchers). We used these assessments to develop a learning progression framework and assess the state of understanding in our sample population.

Results/Conclusions

We will present key attributes of our learning progression framework, data illustrating the current state of student understanding of key ideas related to community ecology, and data related to student learning gains after using a targeted teaching intervention. We found that more advanced students were able to use systems thinking to reason through our assessments and interviews.  In other words, they see processes occurring within a nested hierarchy from individuals, to populations, to communities to ecosystems.  However, young students did not recognize processes as occurring within a hierarchical, connected system.  Instead, young students reason about the natural world using inappropriate anthropomorphic analogies.  These students are able to recognize processes occurring at the level of the individual, but use analogies about family and relationships to discuss ecological communities and use analogies about places and settings to discuss the attributes of ecosystems.  We found that approximately 16% of students exhibited Level 1 reasoning and 3% exhibited Level 4 reasoning.  The majority of students reasoned at a Level 2 (54%) or a Level 3 (29%).  We saw 1-10% decreases in L1 reasoning and 1-10% increases in Level 4 reasoning after students participated in the stream biodiversity teaching unit.  These gains were more modest than we expected.