Stimulating Students’ Socio-Scientific Perspective Taking through Personas

This study investigates students' conception and the influence of the use of personas on the learning outcomes with respect to perspective-taking and argumentation in informed decisionmaking. In this exploratory study, students' conception of perspectives in terms of personas and arguments is investigated. 40 students participated in this study and were asked to create two personas according to their own ideas without any requirements or limitations. For each persona, they provided two possible arguments in favor and two possible arguments against the statement. Finally, the students weighed the arguments for each persona to reach a conclusion about the overall opinion of the persona. Students' assignments booklets, including persona descriptions, arguments and opinions were collected. Data were analyzed qualitatively. The students developed a variety of personas, both with professions and backgrounds in science and with non-science contexts. The perspectives of the most frequent arguments (scientific, technological, and economic) are the same for both groups and arguments have similar themes. It is surprising that, in contrast, the overall opinion (after weighing the respective arguments) does show a difference between ‘scientists' and ‘non-scientists'. We conclude that the persona approach stimulated students' perspective-taking however, the persona construction process can be scaffolded more explicitly