Hong Kong Students’ Decision-Making About Ecological and Health Issues

Decision-making about socioscientific issues could serve as a means to engage students in multi-perspective thinking, critical reasoning, argumentation, and value judgment, which are regarded as increasingly important goals of school education in general and science education in particular. This chapter draws on four studies that examine Hong Kong secondary students’ informal reasoning for decision-making about socioscientific issues in the areas of health and ecology. While some of these studies involved decision-making about issues within the context of Hong Kong, others engaged students in reasoning on regional or global issues with due consideration to the decision of their counterparts in other contexts or cultures. Three distinctive patterns of reasoning among Hong Kong students emerge from this review. These include their general ability to reason from multiple perspectives, insufficient use of scientific evidence to inform decision-making, and the tendency to change their decision through interactions with peers. Furthermore, the use of a decision-making framework to guide students’ decision-making and the impacts of interpersonal exchanges both within and across contextual or cultural groups on students’ decisions were discussed.