Suchergebnisse

PurposeDeficient group processes such as conformity pressure can lead to inadequate group decisions with negative social, economic, or environmental consequences. The study aims to investigate how a group technique (called INFO) improves students' handling of conformity pressure and their collective judgments in the context of a transdisciplinary case study (TCS) for sustainability learning.Design/methodology/approachThe improvement of normative functioning and output (INFO) group technique was tested in a field experiment embedded in a TCS. The INFO technique involves individual and group assessments of task difficulty. The experiment compares the performance of student groups assigned to control and experimental conditions in estimation tasks related to environmental planning and rail traffic.FindingsThe INFO interventions significantly improved the accuracy of group estimates compared to the control conditions. Applying the group technique could promote student's learning and facilitate the search for sustainable solutions in a TCS.Practical implicationsResults indicate that individually and collectively analyzing and discussing difficulties of a task as suggested by the INFO group technique can help students improve collective judgments on real world issues.Originality/valueGroup techniques are a prominent type of TCS methods as group processes are crucial for sustainability learning. First, this study applies the INFO group technique in a TCS in order to evaluate and further develop the technique.

This paper includes three analyses concerning: expert support in the selection of impact variables for scientific models relevant to environmental planning, the quality of students' individual estimates of corresponding impacts before and after a group discussion, and the accuracy of artificially‐aggregated judgments of independent groups. Participants were students of environmental sciences at ETH Zurich. The first analysis revealed that during participation in an environmental case study, students' individual estimates of impacts of variables which have been suggested by experts increased, as compared to the estimates of impacts of additional variables, which have been selected by the students. The remaining analyses consider group discussions on the strength of particular environmental impacts. The quality of the estimates was analyzed referring to expert estimates of the impacts.

Zusammenfassung: Die Studie untersucht auf der Grundlage eines stochastischen Modells (Probabilistic Model of Opinion Change Including Distances; PCD-Modell) den Prozeß der Meinungsänderungen in Gruppendiskussionen. 90 Studenten/innen der Umweltnaturwissenschaften hatten die Aufgabe, im Rahmen einer Fallstudie zur Neugestaltung eines Stadtteils von Zürich Einflußbeziehungen zwischen relevanten Situationsmerkmalen einzuschätzen. Im Laufe der Diskussion stieg die Höhe der Einschätzungen an und ihre Varianz innerhalb der Gruppen nahm ab. Zur Analyse des Meinungsbildungsprozesses wurden 16 Varianten eines PCD-Grundmodells getestet. Von den beiden postulierten, prozeßbestimmenden Faktoren Größe der für eine Alternative votierenden Untergruppe und durchschnittliche Attraktivität der Alternativen erwies sich die Untergruppengröße als der bedeutsamere. Darüber hinaus führte die Berücksichtigung der Distanzen zwischen den Alternativen zu einer deutlichen Verbesserung der Beschreibung des Prozesses, da die Meinungsänderungen in schrittweiser Annäherung an alternative Standpunkte erfolgten.