The building of knowledge, language, and decision-making about climate change science: a cross-national program for secondary students

ABSTRACT

The United Nations’ declaration on climate change education in December 2014 has sparked a renewal of policies and programs initiated during the ‘Decade of Education for Sustainable Development’ (DESD, 2005–2014), aimed at promoting awareness, understanding, and civic action for environmental sustainability within learning communities all around the world. We present findings from a dialogic, multimodal, and literacies-based educational project designed to provide secondary students (N = 141) from four countries with the resources to read about and discuss evidence regarding climate change from seminal studies with peers and a core group of scientists (N = 7). Post-program interviews revealed a significant increase in language use related to evidence-based reasoning. Students also demonstrated an increased propensity to recycle. These findings support the hypothesis that providing opportunities for students to read and discuss seminal scientific sources incites positive changes in beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors related to climate change and climate science, and understandings of the nature of scientific evidence and argumentation.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change science
• evidence-based reasoning
• academic language
• new literacies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Diana Arya is an assistant professor in the Department of Education. Her research interests focus on the literacy practices and processes within K-12 science classroom and professional communities. Her work is particularly focused on language in use within the intersections of school science curricula, the varied genres of scientific texts, classroom interactions, and how disciplinary knowledge is constructed within the context of the discursive practices of scientists across disciplines.

Andrew Maul is an assistant professor in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is broadly interested in the history and philosophy of science, and is particularly interested in the conceptual foundations of research methods in the psychological sciences. His current work focuses on the logic of measurement and the connections between metrology and psychometrics.