Instructional guidelines based on conceptions of students and scientists about economic and population growth within planetary boundaries

Abstract

The burden placed by human activities on Earth is ever-increasing. Global environmental changes have profoundly affected the Earth’s core systems and processes, thus, risking their stability. These core systems and processes are described in the planetary boundary framework. The drastic rate of environmental change over the last 200 years, which is also known as the Great Acceleration, has been depicted graphically by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program. This study is aimed to (1) examine the conceptions of students and scientists regarding socioeconomic growth within planetary boundaries, and (2) develop instructional guidelines based on the comparison of their conceptions. Accordingly, relevant conceptions of 22 junior and 20 senior secondary school students were analyzed. Scientists’ conceptions were extracted by thoroughly analyzing nine publications, which were selected by systematic literature search. Student statements and scientific inferences were coded following established protocols. Our results indicated that junior and senior secondary school students considered global population growth to be the primary cause of global environmental changes. On the contrary, the scientists considered the quantity of natural resources consumed by rich countries in their economic pursuits as the most critical factor in environmental degradation. Based on our findings, we proposed instructional guidelines for planning lessons on changing current socioeconomic systems to enable humans to live within planetary boundaries.