Mirror, mirror on the wall, is nature predictable at all? Tracing students’ ideas on ecosystems’ predictability

Abstract

This paper reports on a case study exploring (a) what students claim about how predictable ecosystems may be, (b) whether students’ claims are related to a ‘particular ecological interest’, and (c) how students justify their claims. The study was performed with 324 postgraduate educational sciences students, who completed the latest version of our nine-scenario, two-tier questionnaire. Analyzing their responses we found that (a) they averagely hold ‘moderate’ ideas about nature’s predictability, (b) there is no significant relation between their claims and the presence of a ‘particular ecological interest’, and (c) most seem to choose their justifications assuming a globally-unstable nature.