Learning about flood risk: comparing the Web-based and physical flood-walk learning environments

The importance of developing the knowledge of risk has been perceived globally today in different research domains (e.g. Levinson, Kent, Pratt, Kapadia, & Yogui, 2011, Renn, 2008), especially after the emergence of socio-scientific issues (i.e. global warming as well as the use of nuclear power as energy resource) and the notion of sustainable development (UN DESD, 2011). For example, in the case of the tsunami disaster that happened in Thailand during 2003, there was a little girl who just learned the knowledge of tsunami in school one week before their trip to Thailand, and when she saw the ‘sign’ of tsunami, she told her parents and then they shouted at the beach and saved a lot of tourists’ lives at that time (Eshach, 2006). In a more recent case of nuclear power problem caused by the tsunami and earthquake in Japan during March 2011, again, it has shown the importance of having risk knowledge and having the ability of relating it to the location of constructing nuclear power plant as well as how to solve the problems in case of a failure. Rauch and Steiner (2013) point out that making a contribution to education for sustainable development needs to have efforts among stakeholders in global learning, citizenship education, health education, peace education and so on. Here, we also want to address that the development of risk knowledge needs not only educators, but also the involvement of different stakeholders from policy, science and society (Bründl, Romang, Bischof, & Rheinberger, 2009).

In Sweden, there is seldom any earthquake problem, but we face risks of floods, for example in the city of Karlstad. Since both River Klarälven and Lake Vänern surround the city and Karlstad is built in a delta area that is constantly changing, floods have always been problematic in Karlstad. Accordingly, the development of risk perception concerning flood is essential. At Karlstad University, a project called ‘the flood walk’ has been developed by the Center for Climate and Safety (CCS) since spring 2010, and the project aims to increase people’s awareness of the risk of flood in general as well as locally in Karlstad. Although the benefits from ‘the flood walk’ activity have been demonstrated from our group’s ‘walk’ experiences during the past years, we are facing difficulties of running ‘the flood walk’ with more than 30 participants and such authentic experience cannot be transferred to people who do not visit Karlstad, or in other countries. To present an optimistic approach for sustainable development, global society as a whole ought to participate in creating a vision of tomorrow (Rauch & Steiner, 2013). Therefore, to convey the knowledge of flood risks to students and different populations without the boundaries of time and space, developing a Web-based learning environment is an important step to move on. The study presented here is a pilot study and aims to develop a Web-based flood-walk learning environment and to compare the participants’ risk knowledge development (cognitive domain) and attitudes (affective domain) between the two learning environments.

Education for sustainable development and the flood walk project

Coping with natural hazards and risk management can be seen as important elements of sustainable development, or in other words, we could say that coping with natural hazards in sustainable ways needs education that is in vein of this direction. In 2002, the United Nations General Assembly puts in place a United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD), spanning from year 2005 to 2014, and designated UNESCO to lead the Decade (UNESCO, 2009). The DESD breaks down the traditional educational scheme and promotes:

interdisciplinary and holistic learning rather than subject-based learning
value-based learning
critical thinking rather than memorizing
multi-method approaches
participatory decision-making
locally relevant information, rather than national.

In this study, both of the ‘Web-based’ and ‘physical’ flood walks are in line with the above-mentioned DESD notion via focusing on the elements of locally relevant information (flooding is considered as one of the major social risks in the municipality of Karlstad), multi-method approach and critical thinking as well as interdisciplinary and holistic learning rather than subject-based learning.

The Flood Walk project is to a large extent based on information from the Flood Program in Karlstad municipality. During the walk, participants are allowed to join a city tour with 14 stops either by walk (focusing on few stops) or by car/bike. The city tour stays in the center of the city, while the car tour goes to the surroundings and at locations in western and eastern parts of Karlstad. There is also a written instruction guide, a compendium. The purpose of developing the written guide is to make it available freely and to use in a flexible way for guiding a group or let people walk on their own. It is also possible to choose what sites participants want to visit and how long participants want to stop, which depends highly on how much time is allowed and the interests of the participating groups.

For each location of the 14 stops during the walk, we have picked out some suitable images. There are historical photos, illustrations, tables with interesting facts of previous flood events and more. The images are laminated and could work as a ‘mobile power point presentation’ during the walk. In the guide material, there are also, for each stop or subject, one or more questions that can be used to guide a discussion among participants and instructor(s). The discussion will probably continue during the walk between the stops. There is also s mall-group discussion (“chat groups”) setting to make participants share experiences and knowledge with each other. At the next stop, new formations of groups might be re-arranged to create a fruitful exchange among participants, guides and researchers/ experts.

Based upon the flood hazards and the importance of risk knowledge as well as the flood walk experiences that our research group has developed, we developed a Web-based flood-walk to convey flood risks and the related risk knowledge to citizens and students nationally and internationally. The major objective was to increase people’s awareness of flood risk and knowledge to cope with this type of nature disasters without the boundaries of time and space.

Dynamic assessment

Comparing traditional methods of assessing people’s achievement, dynamic assessment focuses on assessing people’s learning process and learning potential. We view dynamic assessment as an alternative supplementing approach to traditional methods to assess students’ learning. The term of dynamic assessment was developed by R. Feuerstein in 1979. Basically, we could say that dynamic assessment is a philosophy of conducting assessments. Although there are variations on several dimensions embedded, the most important and consistent characteristics include (Feuerstein, 1979; Haywood & Lidz, 2006):

The assessor actively intervenes during the course of the assessment with the learner with the goal of intentionally inducing changes in the learner's current level of independent functioning.
The assessment focuses on the learner's processes of problem solving.
The most unique information from the assessment is information about the learner's responsiveness to intervention.
The assessment is most often administered in a ‘pre-test, intervention and re-test’ format.

Connecting dynamic assessment to our flood walk project, it is not hard to see the benefit from designing different test items linking to the different teaching-learning context of 14 stops of the flood walk activity. In-between the stops, we could also add questions to evaluate learners’ learning process and cognitive development, which fits the idea of dynamic assessment well. In this study, mainly, we conducted one round of dynamic assessment (with the five chosen stops), and we could consider designing more rounds (with more stops) of dynamic assessment in other future studies. Digital assessment has become a helpful approach today (Eyal, 2012 ), and it fits well to our development of Web-based flood-walk environment. Accordingly, dynamic assessment was conducted as our assessment approach embedding in both of the Web-based and physical flood walks.

Research purpose and questions

The overall aim of the study was to compare students’ knowledge (about nature and society related issues and flood management) development in the Web-based and the physical flood-walk environments. Through this study, the participating pupils were expected to be informed about how our nature and environments are managed and to develop interdisciplinary knowledge with a focus on flood risk issues.

The specific research questions are:

Is there any difference concerning the pupils’ declarative knowledge (knowledge that is conscious and could be verbalized) development related to flood problems between the physical and Web-based flood-walk environments?
Is there any difference regarding the pupils’ attitudes in flood related issue between the physical and Web-based flood-walk environments?