COS 130-4 - CANCELLED - Teaching network science for ecosystem services: An active-learning module for high school and undergraduate students

Background/Question/Methods

Given the challenges that we face in the 21st century, it is imperative that students learn systems thinking–a style of thinking that considers a systems’ parts and their interactions. However, systems thinking is not adequately integrated into curriculum and many students finish both high school and university having never been exposed to this style of thinking. Further, with COVID-19 and transition to online learning, the need for online, active-learning resources is clear.

Food webs and their contributions to human wellbeing (i.e., ecosystem services) provide a relevant perspective for teaching students about interactions within and across systems. We created a learning module that uses food webs and ecosystem services to advance students’ system thinking skills.

We used circular curriculum development and two pilots to develop 150 minutes of resources, including: slides, group activities, and an online game (https://bit.ly/fw-game). We developed a pre- and post-assessment to measure student learning, asking: do students’ ecological knowledge and ability to apply systems thinking skills improve after using our learning module? We hypothesized that students would have a better understanding of ecological systems, and that students would improve their ability to visualize and describe complex ecological systems after our learning module.

Results/Conclusions

Preliminary results from our first two pilots indicate that students generally displayed content gains for many ecological concepts covered in the learning module (e.g., community structure and indirect effects). For the quantitatively analyzed questions, there was a mean increase of 2.32% (SD=±4.98) for the percent of students that answered the questions correctly. Second, students improved their ability to grapple with complexity and think systematically. Specifically, students identified more components and connections in socio-ecological systems after the learning module than before, and were better able to identify and articulate the potential indirect effects that follow species losses–for both species and ecosystem services. Finally, initial drafts of this learning module were effectively taught in-person and online with minor adjustments. We will be collecting additional data on March 1 and 3 to confirm these trends. Nonetheless, our preliminary results from our two pilots show that our learning module on food webs and ecosystem services can be used to improve students’ ecological knowledge and expand students’ ability to think systematically about complex topics.