More than global mindedness: a mixed method exploration of a us-mexico collaboration project on american secondary students' understanding of global food supply and 21st century skills
type: CreativeWork
description: The research literature suggests numerous affective and skill-based benefits for American K-12 students when using Project-Based Learning (PBL) based Global Collaboration Projects (GCPs) in the classroom. Students are afforded opportunities to deepen their understanding and awareness of other cultures (affective domain of attitudes) and build skills necessary for the 21st century (psychomotor domain of skills) as they address a real world problem. This awareness can be quantified as Global Mindedness (GM), defined as a worldview in which one sees oneself as connected and responsible to the global community. Twenty-first century skills are generally viewed as skills specific to communication, creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration. Presently, there is a dearth of research investigating how participation in GCPs augments students’ content understanding within cognitive domains (of knowledge) evidenced by academic achievement in a specific subject area. This is of particular interest to environmental science education, where students are taught the scientific underpinnings of local and global (glocal) issues that affect the Earth as a system (e.g. world hunger). Based upon international benchmark assessments, American students hold a poverty of understanding in science. Therefore, participation in GCPs where students interact with global peers while learning science, may better aid them in conceptualizing systemic environmental issues, facilitating a more robust understanding of scientific issue. This study examined the influence of a GCP on science understandings (achievement) as well as GM and 21st century skill growth, between two teachers and among four Advanced Placement (AP) Environmental Science classes in the same geographic location in Texas. All classrooms employed an identical 3-month PBL module on world hunger, where two classrooms (treatment) participated in a GCP with classrooms in Mexico, while the remaining classrooms (control) did not. Using …
abstract: The research literature suggests numerous affective and skill-based benefits for American K-12 students when using Project-Based Learning (PBL) based Global Collaboration Projects (GCPs) in the classroom. Students are afforded opportunities to deepen their understanding and awareness of other cultures (affective domain of attitudes) and build skills necessary for the 21st century (psychomotor domain of skills) as they address a real world problem. This awareness can be quantified as Global Mindedness (GM), defined as a worldview in which one sees oneself as connected and responsible to the global community. Twenty-first century skills are generally viewed as skills specific to communication, creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration. Presently, there is a dearth of research investigating how participation in GCPs augments students’ content understanding within cognitive domains (of knowledge) evidenced by academic achievement in a specific subject area. This is of particular interest to environmental science education, where students are taught the scientific underpinnings of local and global (glocal) issues that affect the Earth as a system (e.g. world hunger). Based upon international benchmark assessments, American students hold a poverty of understanding in science. Therefore, participation in GCPs where students interact with global peers while learning science, may better aid them in conceptualizing systemic environmental issues, facilitating a more robust understanding of scientific issue. This study examined the influence of a GCP on science understandings (achievement) as well as GM and 21st century skill growth, between two teachers and among four Advanced Placement (AP) Environmental Science classes in the same geographic location in Texas. All classrooms employed an identical 3-month PBL module on world hunger, where two classrooms (treatment) participated in a GCP with classrooms in Mexico, while the remaining classrooms (control) did not. Using …
author: Sahabi, Shannon W.
keywords: 21st century skills, Environmental science, Global collaboration, Global mindedness, Project-based learning
date published: 2018-05
date modified: 2026-07-24T05:04:49Z
provider: Texas Technology University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Texas Tech University

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: https://hdl.handle.net/2346/82096