University Students' Utility Value of Learning About a Local or Nonlocal Environmental Socioscientific Issue: Written Reflections and Instructional Contexts

Socioscientific issues (SSIs) are central to science education, yet empirical research on learners' perceived relevance in SSI teaching and learning remains limited. Utility value is a relevance construct that refers to the perceived usefulness of learning for learners' lives. Prior cross‐institutional research suggests that utility value can differ when the same environmental SSI is encountered in SSI teaching and learning as local or nonlocal across university regions. However, little is known about how instructional approaches in SSI teaching and learning relate to utility value and whether these relationships differ by SSI locality. This study examines two instructional approaches: written reflections designed to prompt utility value connections and instructional contexts used as recurring lenses for SSI engagement. We investigated 5‐week SSI teaching and learning units on oil palm cultivation across four Indonesian universities. SSI locality served as a quasi‐experimental factor, with one university located in a region where oil palm cultivation was locally prominent. Within courses, students were randomly assigned to utility value or content reflection tasks. We analyzed pretest–posttest–follow‐up survey data ( N = 541) and written utility value reflections ( n = 195). For both data sources, we analyzed utility value for four instructional contexts: oil palm management , crop cultivation , sustainable development , and scientific research . Utility value increased from pretest to posttest and was maintained at follow‐up, whereas the utility value reflection task did not measurably add to this increase. Nonlocal‐university students reported higher utility value on average, and local–nonlocal differences followed instructional context‐specific patterns over time. In written reflections, nonlocal‐university students more often articulated elaborated connections between the SSI and their lives across contexts. Findings challenge the assumption that local encounters are automatically associated with higher relevance and suggest that utility value of learning about an environmental SSI depends on the interplay of locality and instructional contexts.