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Critical Positions in the Evaluation of “One Health”-Related Socio-Scientific Issues
Summary
A teaching study with 9th graders found that exposure to socio-scientific issues — including microplastic pollution — through a One Health framework significantly improved students' ability to develop critical positions, with stronger One Health reasoning correlating with better critical evaluation skills by the end of the sequence. This matters for microplastic research because it shows science education framed around systemic environmental health can build public literacy about emerging pollutants.
Critical thinking is essential for managing socio-scientific issues (SSIs) and can be enacted through informal and rational reasoning for decision-making. Addressing SSIs from a systemic view, such as the One Health (OH) view, can improve their comprehension. This study explores how a group of 9th graders engaged in the practice of critical thinking in a teaching sequence that included different SSIs (antibiotic resistance, microplastic pollution, and avian flu) from an OH vision. The research questions are: (1) What is the ability of students to develop a critical position in the evaluation of claims related to SSI with an OH view? (2) What are the interactions between students’ critical positions and OH views expressed by them in different SSI contexts? Written answers from two activities at different moments of the sequence were analyzed qualitatively. Most students did not develop a critical position in the beginning; however, they did so at the end. No interaction was observed between the ability to develop a critical position and the OH view at the beginning. Students with a critical position at the end showed the highest levels of OH view. These results highlight the need to further investigate the relationships between critical positions and OH views.