Climate education in the classroom: cloudy with a chance of confusion

ABSTRACT

What affects the way in which climate change is presented in science classes in public middle and high schools in the United States? A new survey suggests that both individual and community factors play a role. The most effective way to improve climate change education is by improving teacher training in the field of climate science. But there are systemic obstacles to teaching about climate change. New state science standards are helping to diminish such obstacles, but these standards, in turn, are provoking a political backlash across the nation. As with public action on climate change in general, public action on climate change education will be furthered by a recognition of the scientific consensus – and what that consensus means.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change education
• state science standards
• climate change
• scientific consensus
• climate science
• state standards
• climate

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Eric Plutzer, Mark McCaffrey, A. Lee Hannah, and Ann H. Reid for their work on the survey discussed here, the respondents to the survey themselves for their time, and Reid also for her comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes on contributors

Glenn Branch

Glenn Branch is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education. He was the co-editor, with Eugenie C. Scott, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools, and author or coauthor of numerous articles on creationism and evolution in such publications as Scientific American, The American Biology Teacher, and the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics.

Josh Rosenau

Josh Rosenau is programs and policy director at the National Center for Science Education. His expertise ranges from biological diversity and biogeography to legal and constitutional barriers to teaching creationism in public schools and public opinion about science and science education. Rosenau has written on these topics for publications, including Scientific American, the Washington Post, Trends in Microbiology, Seed, and Science Progress.

Minda Berbeco

Minda Berbeco is programs and policy director at the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). She earned her PhD in biology from Tufts University, where she researched the effects of climate change on terrestrial systems, and subsequently was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Davis. She has written about challenges to climate change science and education for the Washington Post, The American Biology Teacher, The Science Teacher, and Live Science. At NCSE, she recently launched a new teacher outreach program, NCSEteach (http://ncse.com/teach).