Diagnosing of Valuing and Decision-Making Competencies in Biology Lessons

Valuing and decision-making competencies in the context of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) play an important role in the national educational standards (NBS) of biology. Secondary level students should be prepared to recognize and evaluate biological facts, and justify their own or others’ opinions. To reach these goals, in close cooperation with teachers and researchers, a 6-h teaching lesson in the ESD context about the topic “peatland protection” was developed, tested, and optimized in three cycles in the period from 2016 to 2020. In total, 181 students (95 ♀ | ♂ 86, Ø age: 14,5) participated in the investigation. The study was conducted according to the Design-Based-Research (DBR) approach. In close cooperation with seven teachers, a competence model for the diagnosis of learners’ written statements about socio-scientific issues in the ESD context was developed. As a central result, a theory-based and empirically validated competence grid was developed, evaluated, and optimized. In addition to linguistic aspects, this so-called PARS model considered the thematically relevant ESD dimensions (Ternieten, Elster, Diagnosis and promotion of decision-making competence of students with methods of internal differentiation in biology lessons. In: Gómez Chova L, López Martínez A, Candel Torres I (eds.) EDULEARN20 proceedings. 12th international conference on education and new learning technologies, Palma, Spain, 6–7 July 2020 (pp 1413–1422). IATED Academy, Valencia. https://doi.org/10.21125/edulearn.2020 , 2020). The central results of the teacher interviews prove that the PARS model (diagnose grid) can be classified as a practical tool for diagnosing student performance in the context of ESD.