Conceptual change in socioscientific issues: learning about obesity

Abstract

Conventional school science has often portrayed obesity as a self-inflicted problem. It tends to ignore perspectives at the systems level, such as social, political, marketing and economic factors that shape an obesogenic environment that determines individual eating and lifestyle patterns. Therefore, socioscientific decisions (e.g. fat tax) are likely to be biased against the obese and ultimately fail to overcome this global health challenge. Students should examine obesity from multiple perspectives to make informed decisions about it. Based on the concepts of adherence and prevalence in the conceptual change literature, this paper examines students’ learning of multiple perspectives in terms of (i) a change in the number of references to different perspectives in making sense of obesity and (ii) a shift in adherence to and prevalence of different causes of obesity. A total of 114 undergraduate students from a diverse range of major subjects enrolled in a general education course about obesity participated in this study. The course design was guided by an SSI Teaching and Learning model. Pre-/post-course questionnaires, essays, and follow-up interviews were used to chart students’ learning during the 12-week course and 6 months afterwards. The students became more able to explain obesity using perspectives from multiple dimensions. They adhered less strongly to personal-level causes of obesity and more accepting of systems-level perspectives. We conclude by arguing that it is not only important for teachers to enhance the number of perspectives considered by students, but also attend to their differences in weights to facilitate students’ learning of SSI.