Leading team:
- Dr. Michal Haskel Ittah
- Karen Waskewitz
- Yael Shtechman
Brief
Sustainability challenges require citizens to recognize environmental problems as complex, multi-layered, and often lacking simple solutions. This project investigates how specific forms of knowledge support the development of such recognition within sustainability-related reasoning. Using the socio-scientific reasoning (SSR) framework, comprising recognition of complexity, identification of missing information, consideration of multiple perspectives, and epistemic skepticism, we examine how different types of causal knowledge in various forms contribute to these dimensions. Our focus is on how mechanistic and multilink causal reasoning shape the ways students frame and interpret sustainability problems. The study is conducted with elementary and middle school students. In third grade, students engage with the issue of cutting down trees in contexts that involve ecological, societal, and infrastructural considerations. In middle school, students explore the issue of food waste and its environmental, economic, and food security implications. Students’ discourse is analyzed to identify how causal and mechanistic knowledge is used and to map these onto the dimensions of socio-scientific reasoning. By examining how knowledge functions within reasoning about sustainability issues, this project aims to clarify how instructional design can support early development of informed and reflective engagement with complex environmental challenges.