Cognitive Illusions as Hindrances to Learning Complex Environmental Issues.

This study examined the effectiveness of an environmental science course for teaching college students about the ozone depletion problem. In the spring of 2000, students in the course, "Life in the Environment," were pretested and posttested with a 38-item questionnaire consisting of 3 sets of Likert-style statements plus multiple choice questions. The first set of questions focused on the results of ozone depletion. The second set focused on causes of ozone depletion. The third set targeted ways to lessen ozone depletion. Five of the multiple choice questions targeted factual information, and the last two focused on opinions. Overall, posttest scores were lower than pretest scores. Students showed a strong tendency to conflate cause and effect relationships between several different environmental issues which were really not related. This was especially pronounced for global warming and ozone depletion. The results reveal the difficulty in guiding students to construct proper concepts for complex subject matter by means of traditional, direct instruction methods. The questionnaire, which makes up the majority of the document, is appended. (SM)