Competences to improve the arguments and decision making on biodiversity conservation

Abstract

Biodiversity turns out to be a complex concept, becoming an important curricular point of reference. The problem which it involves concerns all citizens, who can and should be trained to make decisions for their conservation. This research intends to discover if an advanced exercise of the necessary competences to make the concept of biodiversity significant in different contexts entails a considerable improvement of the quality of the arguments involved in the decision making on biodiversity conservation. For this purpose, a qualitative methodology has been applied to the analysis of 12 arguments, formulated by 5th grade students of Secondary Education, characterized by their high structural complexity. One of them is shown as an example. The results reveal that, despite the level of structural cohesion and global coherence shown by the arguments analyzed, it is not possible to speak of a general tendency towards high levels of abstraction.