Does Pollution Only Affect Human Health? A Scenario for Argumentation in the Framework of One Health Education

Reviewer's comments

Authors' responses

The flow of the article is very good, but fulfil the link provided: www.mdpi.com/xxx/s1 with the supplementary materials that are important for the readers.

We regret not having included the link to the supplementary material earlier. We did not know whether we should create the link ourselves (external cloud), or whether it is generated by the publisher during the layout process. Also, we thought that the supplementary material is shared with the reviewers during the review process. In any case, we attach the document so that you can assess its suitability.

I miss important information for teachers: how much students had to do for the task.

We do not quite understand what you mean. We are uncertain whether you want us to add information about the time students are expected to spend on each task, or whether you want us to make explicit the degree of autonomy with which they are expected to work. If the latter, we would like to clarify that groups of learners should work as autonomously as possible throughout the activity, with occasional scaffolding by the teacher (explaining tasks, clarifying doubts, redirecting discussions through thought-provoking questions). We have clarified the role of the teacher in lines 329-332.

As for the tasks to be performed, students have to read the Facebook news and identify/select the relevant data. They are then provided with the technical report from which they have to extract new information, relating it to the news item and to their prior knowledge. Finally, they have to propose solutions, based on the reasoning used to rank the cities.

Finally, if you ask us to specify what students are specifically expected to do (reference response), you can refer to section 2.2 (methodology section).

According to the results, the conclusion with pedagogical indications is appropriate, perhaps it should be emphasised and added that higher levels of cognitive thinking are developed, as well as analysis, synthesis.

We have addressed your suggestion in the concluding section (lines 543-547).

The author confuses the scientific goals of the paper and the pedagogical goals of learning.

In the introduction section we have clarified the research objective of our study:

The aim of the research is to check whether the design of the activity [assessment tool] allows for the characterisation of students' performance in the scientific practice of argumentation, analysing how they use the available evidence (data on environmental, animal, and human health), as well as the reasoning followed when proposing solutions to avoid the problem. To this end, two research questions (RQ) are addressed (…)

The analysis of the students' arguments allows us to validate whether the design of the activity contributes to covering the limitations detected in the studies described in the introductory section, addressing environmental problems from a "One Health" perspective, and considering their effects at the cellular level. We want to broaden the range of proposals for working on cell division and its relation to health, integrating different approaches that students are not normally required to apply at the same time. We hope to have clarified the extent to which our research can be of value to the educational field.

Since the scientific goal of the study is not clearly formulated, the literature review looks irrelevant, the conclusion is fuzzy, and the abstract does not represent the study well enough.

In the introductory section of the manuscript, we describe different educational intervention proposals found in the literature to address socio-scientific issues related to environmental problems (especially climate change). We point out the limitations detected in them (they are not usually approached from a health perspective, they do not usually require students to handle the microscopic scale, and so on). Therefore, in designing our activity, we tried to fill these gaps by asking students to argue from evidence related to environmental, animal, and human health (One Health), and to consider the complexity of environmental problems when proposing solutions.
As for the analysis carried out to answer the research questions formulated at the end of the introduction, we focus on the arguments provided by the students, describing and discussing the results. Finally, we formulate conclusions and pose global challenges for the design of activities in the 21st century: the need for students to learn to interpret the same scientific information represented through different semiotic modalities; the need to understand the health of the planet and its inhabitants as unique; the need for students to become familiar with teamwork and group argumentation on issues that have no single, obvious solution; and the importance of thinking of solutions to improve the problems of environmental degradation, considering the consequences of their application at different levels of social concern (e. g., Economy, Environment, Science, Public Health, Politics) as a whole.

Reviewer's comments

Authors' responses

65: Explain the term “place-based” please.

With the new wording (lines 64-67), we hope that the meaning of the text is clearer. The selected example shows a didactic proposal to work on a specific environmental problem, focused on living beings (impact of the disappearance of wolves in Yellowstone), after talking about studies focused on such a general environmental problem as climate change. We mention below that none of these examples address environmental problems from a health perspective. This is something we hope to help improve in the design of our activity.

67: Could you please explain in what ways visiting Yellowstone National Park helped students the impact of reintroducing wolves into the ecosystem?

We have addressed your suggestion in lines 64-72 of the manuscript.

“Thus, some students donated their participant incentive to an environmental organisation in Yellowstone”. I find it hard to understand the meaning of this sentence.

We have addressed your suggestion in lines 64-72 of the manuscript. We have removed the reference to the donation made by the students during the visit. We believe that the new wording maintains the main idea: the educational intervention led some learners to decide to take action (e.g., by donating money) to improve the situation.

81-84: This does not seem to be an direct conclusion of the above. I suggest that you elaborate your arguments.

We have addressed your suggestion in lines 82-86 of the manuscript. Hopefully, the relationship between the ideas discussed in the two paragraphs is now clearer.

84-91: Text here is confusing. I suggest the authors to rephrase this paragraph and reorder their arguments in order to make a clearer point.

We have addressed your suggestion in lines 86-99 of the manuscript. We hope we have clarified the text.

101-105: Following your argument in 100-101 about evaluation, I think you should refer to that here aswell.

We have included this information in lines 112-113. We felt that the idea of evaluation was implicit in the planning of solutions.

106-127: This description of the implementation should go to method.

We consider it essential to keep a brief description of the activity designed in the introductory section, as it helps to understand the scope of the study carried out. The idea to be emphasised is that the activity aims to contribute to filling the gaps identified in other studies mentioned above in the introduction. If we move the requested information to the method section, we doubt that the relevance of the research questions, formulated just after, will be understood.

130-131: Ranking according to which criteria?

We have addressed your suggestion in line 142 of the manuscript.

173-175: Please explain how are the students supposed to think about meiosis. Which are the hints for them to get down to the cellular level?

In response to your comment, we have slightly reworded lines 191-195.

After reading the Facebook post about the supposed curse of the Blackwater River whereby people in towns near the river had reproductive problems, students were asked to think about the cause on a biological level.

The teachers did not give them any clues that would lead them to think about meiosis. In their hypotheses, they were expected to allude to the cellular level, since, as Virchow said, "all diseases are disturbances at the cellular level". Specifically, they were expected to consider meiosis (cell division), as it is an essential process for sexual reproduction.

As shown on lines 286-292 in the results section, not all groups initially referred to meiosis.

190-191: Please explain how is the human food source connected with MN in harlequin flies.

We are sorry to have caused this confusion. Figure 2 shows the relationships we expect students to establish between the data. On the one hand, the concept map relates “food contaminated by pesticide use” to the existence of “errors in meiosis” in the inhabitants of Támara. On the other hand, water contamination by pesticides causes MN formation in the harlequin fly.

The examples selected in brackets were not related to each other, but as this could be confusing, we have decided to replace "micronuclei formation" with "errors in meiosis" (line 210).

229-230: Please clarify step 4.

We have addressed your suggestion on page 8 of the manuscript. We hope that we have clarified the procedure followed.

310-314: I think you should argue on the teachers’s activity: how could they intervene? What was their role?

We hope to clarify your doubt through the information included in lines 329-332 of the manuscript.

439: Why is it a non-explicit demand of the activity since it is part if the RQ? Please, argue on this methodological decision

The proposal of reasoned solutions is the second task of the activity. Therefore, the initial RQ2 was: “What solutions do students propose to avoid the toxic risk?” However, during the analysis of the results, we noticed that some groups evaluated the feasibility of some of the solutions they proposed, and others did not, limiting themselves to the task of proposing solutions.

In this context, we found it interesting to consider from which perspectives the effects of the implementation of the proposed solutions were evaluated. Since students do not usually evaluate their arguments, we wanted to highlight the fact that some of them were able to do so even if the demand was not explicit. So, we decided to add to the RQ2 a second part, after interacting with the transcripts of the group discussions: "…and how do they evaluate the impact of implementing them?"

Considering your question, we think it is better to remove the second part of the RQ2, as it is not an explicit requirement. However, we maintain the text in its entirety. The analysis carried out and the results obtained complement the answer to the first part of the question, as they provide insight into the different ways in which groups proceed when planning their solutions.

Reviewer's comments

Authors' responses

Describe the method (case study) before section 2.1 and justify its appropriateness with respect to the research objectives.

We have addressed your suggestion in lines 145-152 of the manuscript. We hope it will be in line with expectations.

Separate the description of the data collection techniques and instruments used from the data analysis into two distinct sections.

We find it unfeasible to carry out the separation of information that you suggest. We believe that the way we have presented the information facilitates the understanding of the whole analysis process followed, as Tables 1 and 2 (sequence of steps to analyse the data collected in each phase of the activity) are directly related to Figures 4 and 5 and Table 3 (categorisation systems used for the analysis).

Specify how the two cycles of analysis referred to in Table 1 were developed. Was there a piloting/training prior to independent coding? What criteria were applied in the discussion of discrepancies?

0. Prior to the first cycle of analysis, the first author generated a list of preliminary categories of levels of evidence use, based on the literature and interaction with the data (transcripts of group discussions).

1. The three authors proceeded to do a first cycle of coding using the preliminary categories, and there were disagreements. This led us to refine the categories, as some were ambiguous, others could be split into several categories, and so on. For example, we decided to separate the category of "establishing valid cause-effect relationships to solve the task" according to whether the relationships were monocausal or multicausal. At the lower levels (data integration in justifications), we also decided to distinguish between the types of data that students considered when arguing (whether they were only textual, or whether they also considered visual and numerical data, integrating/relating the information provided in all of them).

2. After refining the categories, in the second cycle of analysis we reached a percentage of agreement of 87.84% (almost total). When discussing the discrepancies, the three authors always reached a verbal consensus, accepting in all cases the majority position (i.e., if 2/3 coders had agreed on the categorisation).