Identifying gaps in climate change education - a case study in Austrian schools

Abstract

In a case study among Austrian school students, we checked the school students’ knowledge and awareness of climate change on different levels of complexity. We aimed to find out whether school students are able to understand more complex, reciprocal relations between human activities and consequences for the climate. Furthermore, we tested whether a more active and longer engagement with the topic achieved a better understanding and raised climate-friendly behavior more effectively than a short learning phase. Our online survey results revealed that the students had high fact knowledge of climate change (effects) but lacked deeper understanding of more intricate relationships and long-term interactions of climate change effects on people and ecosystems. The vast majority of students believed that every single person can contribute significantly to tackle climate change, however, personal and deliberate climate-friendly actions were limited. The differences between the two levels of engagement were small. We suggest that modern educational concepts should foster system-understanding and support young people’s positive attitude towards climate protection by pointing out concrete, climate-friendly ways of behavior to bridge the gap between knowledge and action.

Keywords:

• Climate change education
• climate literacy
• scientific literacy
• system understanding
• value-action gap

Acknowledgements

We thank all involved school students and teachers for their active support, their creativity and motivation in elaborating the peer-learning formats, and their valuable feedback.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Austrian StartClim2019 grant, jointly financed by the Austrian ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation, and Technology (BMK), the Austrian ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMWFW), the province of Upper Austria, and the Austrian climate and energy fund.