Insects play a crucial role in maintaining the balance in ecosystems and provide essential ecosystem services that directly benefit us humans. Unfortunately, many groups of insects are rapidly declining, and researchers warn from the negative consequences of this decline. Therefore, it is highly relevant to educate people about the issue of insect decline and to empower people to take actions that contribute to sustain insect biodiversity. The presented teaching intervention "Actions for Insects" supports students in developing their own action competence to contribute to insect conservation. The intervention focuses on action-oriented learning to provide learners with the possibility to plan and take own real world actions for insect conservation. Action for Insects provides students with background information on insects, facilitates hands-on actions to support insects, and encourages students to use iNaturalist as a digital tool for insect observation. The teaching design is theory-based and fits to the Swedish curriculum for lower and upper secondary schools, which enables an integration in regular biology classes. The intervention was successfully tested with more than 180 students from four lower secondary compulsory schools in Sweden in 2022. The accompanying research showed that the participating students improved their self-perceived levels of knowledge, confidence, and willingness to take conservation actions for insects. The symposium contribution focuses on the theoretical backgrounds and the structure of Actions for Insects and highlights key findings and practical experiences.

Actions for Insects – An action-oriented intervention on biodiversity and insect conservation

Rationale

Insects play a vital role in maintaining ecosystem balance and provide essential ecosystem services that directly benefit humans. They have various roles in nature, such as predators, prey, pollinators, and decomposers, influencing how ecosystems function. Unfortunately, many groups of insects are rapidly declining, and researchers warn from the potential consequences of this decline for both humans and natural food webs (Cardoso et al., 2020). 

Scientists argue that we must take actions to support insect biodiversity now and educate the public to take action (Harvey et al., 2020). Thus, it is essential from a sustainability perspective to teach about the issue of insect decline in schools and equip students with the relevant skills to support insect biodiversity. Teaching about these topics also fits to key concepts in biology and science education (e.g., sustainability, ecosystem services, biodiversity). However, educational research about students’ personal perspectives in the context of insect decline and insect conservation is very limited (Ruck & Mannion, 2021).

Key objectives

A first objective of the presented project is to design a teaching intervention that helps students to develop competencies to take actions for insect conservation. 

A second objective is to investigate how the self-perceived action competence for insect conservation changes through this intervention.

Research design and methodology

The intervention design builds on the theoretically underpinned concept of action competence, which describes peoples’ ability to address complex problems (Sass et al., 2020). The design aims to support learners’ action competence by building on specific criteria (action-orientation, holism, pluralism) that are beneficial for fostering learners’ action competence (Sinakou et al., 2019). The teaching design was adjusted to the age group and the biology curriculum of Swedish compulsory schools in grades 7 and 8 (12-15 years). The resulting intervention was then implemented at four schools in a Swedish municipality in spring 2022. 

The development of students’ self-perceived action competence through the intervention was investigated quantitatively in a pre-post setting. The investigation focused on the three dimensions of self-perceived knowledge, confidence and willingness to take actions for insect conservation. The sampling consisted of an intervention group (pre-test: n=190, post-test: n=137) and a control group (pre-test: n=99, post-test: n=86) receiving regular biology lessons. The quantitative data was analysed using descriptive statistics and t-tests in IBM SPSS.

Outcome & Findings 

A first outcome of the project is the theoretically grounded teaching intervention “Actions for Insects”, which is the first intervention building on the concept of action competence for insect conservation. The intervention consists of three phases. In the first phase, students learn relevant background information about insects and insect decline. Additionally, students work with iNaturalist as a digital tool for exploring insect biodiversity and the students search for insects at the schoolyard. At the end of the first phase, students plan their own actions to support insects. These actions can be anything that directly supports insects (e.g., growing insect-friendly flowers) or indirectly (e.g., informing others about actions). In the second phase, students have time to take these planned actions. Students decide for themselves which actions to take and how to proceed. During this phase, students are encouraged to take pictures of insects and upload them to iNaturalist. In the final third phase, students have the opportunity to reflect on their actions and on their role as researchers in iNaturalist.

A second outcome are the results from the pre-post-study that accompanied the implementation of the teaching intervention. On average, students had significantly higher values in the post-test after the intervention for the self-perceived knowledge, confidence, and willingness to take insect conservation actions. The largest effect sizes were observable for the self-perceived knowledge and the confidence. The students’ in the post-test after regular biology lessons in the control group had significantly higher values only for the self-perceived knowledge, whereas the self-perceived confidence and willingness did not change significantly. The effect sizes of all changes in the control group were smaller than in the intervention group.

Conclusions

The developed teaching intervention “Actions for Insects” proved to be effective in supporting the development of students self-perceived action competence, by fostering all three dimensions of knowledge, confidence, and willingness. We can conclude that students particularly need specific action-oriented knowledge (Which actions are effective? How to take these actions?). A novel aspect of the intervention is that it encompasses a variety of insects, going beyond teaching methods that focus on individual species. By this, the research project provides new insights for biodiversity education that are from high international relevance. The teaching design is open in the sense that it can be easily adjusted to other countries, school specific needs, and students' prior knowledge. At the symposium, we will discuss how the intervention and underlying concepts of action competence and action-orientation can contribute to effective biodiversity education in general, based on the findings from this study.

References

Cardoso, P., Barton, P. S., Birkhofer, K., Chichorro, F., Deacon, C., … & Samways, M. J. (2020). Scientists' warning to humanity on insect extinctions. Biological Conservation, 242, 108426. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2020.108426 

Harvey, J. A., Heinen, R., Armbrecht, I., Basset, Y., Baxter-Gilbert, J. H., … & de Kroon, H. (2020). International scientists formulate a roadmap for insect conservation and recovery. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 4(2), 174-176. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-019-1079-8 

Ruck, A., & Mannion, G. (2021). Stewardship and beyond? Young people’s lived experience of conservation activities in school grounds. Environmental Education Research, 27(10), 1502-1516. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2021.1964439 

Sass, W., Boeve-de Pauw, J., Olsson, D., Gericke, N., De Maeyer, S., & Van Petegem, P. (2020). Redefining action competence: The case of sustainable development. The Journal of Environmental Education, 51(4), 292-305. https://doi.org/10.1080/00958964.2020.1765132 

Sinakou, E., Donche, V., Boeve-de Pauw, J., & Van Petegem, P. (2019). Designing Powerful Learning Environments in Education for Sustainable Development: A Conceptual Framework. Sustainability, 11(21), 5994. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11215994