Teaching the ecosystem service concept: experience from academia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although ecosystem service (ES) is a well-established concept among the scientific community, it has not reached the mainstream of public awareness because it lacks wide recognition among citizens and educators. Teaching of ES may contribute to the mainstreaming of the ES concept and its framework in society in a critical and meaningful way, toward sustainable development. In fact, the ES concept is a key tool for communicating our social dependence on natural ecosystems, and therefore it has high didactic potential. However, this didactic potential is under-explored, because there is a lack of scholarship related to teaching the ES concept. There is little evidence, for example, on whether scientists who research ES also teach the concept and thus contribute to raising the level of ES awareness in society, and if so, how such teaching processes could be improved, to broaden the impact to citizen awareness. To close this knowledge gap, we delved deeper into how the ES concept is taught and which teaching strategies are currently being used by ES research academics. We aimed to establish connections between those teaching practices and best educational practices described in educational literature. This analysis will help to provide insights into academics’ teaching approaches, as well as how these practices could be improved. A key finding of our research is that teachers with little experience in ES teaching are less likely to use active teaching methods or to evaluate their teaching (both related to best educational practices), whereas lecturers with more years of experience in teaching the ES concept are more in line with best educational practices. Therefore, collaboration and networking among teachers with different levels of experience could help improve the quality of ES concept teaching. We suggest the establishment of a platform to facilitate regular exchange among teachers and educators from different teaching contexts and educational levels. Finally, we propose several future research directions in this emerging research area in order to continue revealing the existing research gap in the teaching of the ES concept.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".