Abstract:

In the German National Educational Standards of Biology (KMK, 2004), decision making competences in the context of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) are considered an important issue in order to prepare the students for discussions of socio-scientific questions, to train argumentation skills as well as the ability to judge. However, the promotion of decision-making competences is a challenge in many schools not only in the inclusive lower secondary classes of Bremen (Alfs et al., 2012).

The aims of the study are to develop a teaching and learning unit and to empirically review wether the used methods of internal differentiation are suitable for promoting the decision-making competence in heterogeneous classes. In addition, a competence model is developed and optimized to diagnose students’ level of decision making. The teaching and learning activity comprises material-based writing (Sturm, 2017), argumentation, and reasoning of decisions of a complex ESD theme (ecosystem conservation of swamps). As research paradigm the Design-Based Research (DBR) approach is used which comprises three cycles. From 2016 to 2019 overall 180 students of the 9th grade participated in the study. In individual or partner work, ecological, economic and social arguments were deduced from different textual materials and documented in so-called argument lists. As a next step the students wrote judgements about the question “Shall we protect the ecosystem swamp?” In addition, a questionnaire (pre-post) was used to investigate the self-estimation of the performance of the students and interviews with teachers and students were conducted. For the diagnosis of the students’ competences a complex analysis instrument based on (Biggs & Collis, 1982; Bögeholz et al., 2006; Fensham & Rennie, 2013) was developed. The written judgements were analyzed qualitatively according to (Mayring, 2007) and used for diagnosing the decision-making competences of the students.

In the first cycle (2016-17) the central finding is, that the decision-making competences are low and have a need for development. The second cycle (2017-18) shows, that the used methods and materials work basically but needs further improvement. The competence grid used for the diagnosis does not take the ESD spheres enough into account in the assessment and the focus of the material-based writing-method still puts too much emphasis on the language and not on the ESD-content. That leads to a redesign of the teaching and learning unit as well as the competence diagnosis grid. The third cycle (2018-19) shows, that students can make a differentiated judgement with the improved methods and materials and teachers are able to diagnose these learning products with the optimized grid. In addition, the findings demonstrate that - due to the comparatively short processing time - lower performer use relatively few arguments in their judgements and their results remain superficial overall whereas higher performer write complex judgements.

That leads to the conclusion that subject-linguistic aspects should be taken in account more explicitly in the evaluation of the judgements. Further on, the linguistic optimised materials should be embedded in a longer teaching unit on an ESD topic in order to further improve the depth of content of the learning products.

Keywords:

Competence promotion, competence diagnosis, Design-based Research, internal Differentiation, heterogeneous learning Groups, ESD.