Epistemic Beliefs as a Means of Understanding Critical Thinking in a Socioscientific Environmental Debate

Kévin de Checchi (1) , Gwen Pallarès (1) , Valérie Tartas (2) , Manuel Bächtold (1)

1 LIRDEF - Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire de Recherche en Didactique, Éducation et Formation
2 CLLE - Cognition, langues, langage, ergonomie

Environmental and sustainability issues are of decisive importance for our society. As future citizens, students need to be able to take part in an informed way in debates on environmental socioscientific issues (SSIs) and to think and argue critically. Developing students’ critical thinking (CT) about science and its links to societal issues has thus become a major challenge (Hazelkorn et al., 2015). Environmental SSIs are complex (Morin et al., 2017), as students need to combine knowledge from different disciplines with values and other people’s opinions, in order to adopt an enlightened position and engage in critical argumentation. Learners also need to deal with knowledge uncertainties (Kampourakis, 2018), as these are a distinctive feature of SSIs. Lastly, students need to be aware of the openness of these issues: there are numerous reasonable answers to an SSI, none of them is self-evident and all must be argued (Oulton et al., 2004).

Domaines: Education

Kévin de Checchi, Gwen Pallarès, Valérie Tartas, Manuel Bächtold. Epistemic Beliefs as a Means of Understanding Critical Thinking in a Socioscientific Environmental Debate. Critical Thinking in Biology and Environmental Education, Springer International Publishing, pp.229-248, 2022, Contributions from Biology Education Research, ⟨10.1007/978-3-030-92006-7_13⟩. ⟨hal-03787226⟩