Development and validation of the ACSI: measuring students’ science attitudes, pro-environmental behaviour, climate change attitudes and knowledge

Abstract

This article describes the development and validation of the Attitudes towards Climate Change and Science Instrument. This 63-item questionnaire measures students’ pro-environmental behaviour, their climate change knowledge and their attitudes towards school science, societal implications of science, scientists, a career in science and the urgency of climate change. The results from the pilot and the final study show the questionnaire meets validity and reliability criteria. A total number of 671 secondary school students from five European countries (France, Norway, Italy, The Netherlands and Spain) completed the questionnaire. The results of the principal components factor analysis show that all scales were unidimensional. Internal reliability using Cronbach’s alpha varies between 0.71 and 0.87. Concurrent validity was shown by younger students, females and students with high science grades scoring higher on several attitudes than respectively older students, male students, or students with low science grades. Overall, correlations show weak but significant relationships between science-related attitudes on the one hand and climate change- and environment-related attitudes on the other. Based on our findings, our instrument is useful for understanding the ways in which students think about science, scientists, climate change and the environment.

Keywords:

• science attitudes
• pro-environmental behaviour
• climate change
• instrument
• secondary education

Acknowledgement

This study was supported by the Science in Society program of the EU under grant agreement number 217751.

Notes

^∗Significant correlation (p < 0.01, 2-tailed).

^∗ p < 0.05.

^∗∗ p < 0.01.

1. In this research, we take environment-related attitudes to refer to attitudes towards the urgency of climate change and pro-environmental behaviour.