Cultural probes for environmental education: Designing learning materials to engage children and teenagers with local biodiversity

the way a CP toolkit introduces questioning in proposed activities can influence participant responses. During analysis, the need to avoid a saturation of question forming within each activity became evident as an essential consideration in the design of IBL-inspired CP. For example, the task associated with Activity 6 already presupposed questions. When asked to write two more questions, the fatigue may have resulted in participants adopting a strategic approach with the view of quickly concluding the activity. Question prompts should then be subtle and well-integrated when questioning is part of an activity. In addition, the ages of par- ticipants appear to positively influence the generation of productive questions, although for the current study, we are unable to draw a more robust conclusion regarding age, considering that the activities were different for each group. Nonetheless, it was clear that overall, some tokens produced more strategic questions. Also, tokens were not equally significant in generating questions concerning nature. Tokens prompting comparisons ("How are. . . and. . . similar?", and "How do. . . and. . . differ?") and those relating to the utility of something ("How could. . . be used to. . .?") were less used. It is possible that such tokens limit the expressive power of participant-generated questions, com- pared to the other tokens. For example, the question "How do trees and mosses differ?" was created only by adding two nouns to the question. The token that asks participants to identify

a concrete purpose or utility for something resulted in questions such as "How could the water from the lagoon be used?". In this instance, participants did not use the complete token, possi- bly considering that it was not easy to find a concrete purpose when contemplating the utility of the water in the lagoon. Although we have no evidence to suggest how our participants might favor ’doing’ versus ’knowing’ (procedural knowledge/experiential learning), we specu- late that a question token that requires focus on the utility of something can pose challenges. Results gathered in response to RQ1 shed light on the application of IBL in the design of learning materials for EE. Drawing on the broader literature, as in the work of Lazonder and Harmsen [37], questioning is effective when supported. However, as detailed above, there are various ways to support inquiry. The study we describe here relied on question tokens. Given the authors’ categorization of support as "unguided, minimally guided, (or) guided", and the data obtained in this study, question tokens only "minimally guided" participants in posing questions. As a result, we believe that more consistent guidance would be a necessary precur- sor for achieving better results in the quality and quantity of productive questions generated. Fig 14. Distribution of self-reported motivations (n = 35) to return to the trail, collected in the post-trail activity from the 33 participants, according to focus and age group. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262853.g014 PLOS ONE Cultural probes for environmental education

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