Supporting education about environmental sustainability: Evaluation of a progressive learning route for qualitative models

Qualitative reasoning (QR) models can encapsulate a lot of expert, conceptual knowledge about interconnections of society, policy, and the environment common to issues concerning environmental sustainability. This paper describes a lesson plan designed to support learner exploration of QR models about sustainability, with the aim of supporting the goal of the European Union's Sustainable Development Strategy to build an active, engaged, and educated society that is prepared to contribute to decision-making about sustainability issues. The lesson plan includes ten questions that follow a QR model's progression from system structure through causality and dynamics to engage learners in application and evaluation of model outputs. We evaluated effectiveness of the lesson plan for supporting learning. Our first evaluation demonstrated that university students could effectively reason from and interpret diagrams produced by the modeling software that corresponded to content addressed in each of the ten questions in the lesson plan. Our second evaluation demonstrated that following the proposed lesson plan, students were able to abstract domain-specific understanding of key concepts from a series of three progressively more complex and realistic models. Furthermore, the proposed lesson format engages students in high levels of cognitive function when examining models and simulations. Hence, the progressive learning route provides a useful structure for designing a model-based curriculum for learning about environmental sustainability.