Climate crisis learning through scaffolded instructional tools

ABSTRACT

Objective

Socially-relevant and controversial topics, such as the climate crisis, are subject to differences in the explanations that scientists and the public find plausible. Scaffolds can help students be evaluative of the validity of explanations based on evidence when addressing such topics and support knowledge gains.

Method

This study compared two scaffolds in which students weighed connections between lines of evidence and explanations for the topics of climate change and extreme weather events.

Results

A Wilcoxon-signed rank test showed that students’ plausibility judgements shifted towards scientifically accepted explanations and that students increased their knowledge about climate crisis topics after completing both activities. A structural equation model suggested that students’ shifts in plausibility judgements drive their knowledge gains for the extreme weather activity, but the climate change activity demonstrated a possible ceiling effect in its usefulness for learning.

Conclusions

When students choose their lines of evidence and explanatory models, their plausibility reappraisals result in greater levels of post-instructional knowledge. Although effect sizes were modest, the results of this study demonstrate that students’ explicit reappraisal of plausibility judgements can support deeper learning of climate crisis issues.

KEY POINTS

What is already known about this topic:

1. Students may have difficulty understanding complex or controversial topics such as the climate crisis.

2. Evaluation is a key component of scientific thinking and a major piece of science and engineering practices.

3. Instructional scaffolds can provide a way to help students learn how to evaluate competing models or explanations about a scientific phenomenon and lead to changes in their plausibility judgements about those explanations.

What this topic adds:

1. Instructional scaffolds called Model-Evidence Link (MEL) diagrams have been created for two aspects of the climate crisis: the cause of climate change and the relationship between extreme weather and climate change.

2. The two climate crisis MEL scaffolds support students in evaluating different explanations and learning about these topics.

3. The build-a-MEL scaffold, where students choose aspects of the activity, resulted in greater changes in students’ plausibility judgements than the preconstructed MEL.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate crisis
• climate change
• science education
• scientific reasoning
• argumentation
• scaffold learning

Acknowledgments

Sonia Jamani and Janelle Bailey worked in tandem as co-lead authors and shared responsibilities equally, with authorship listed alphabetically. The team would like to thank the special issue editor, Doug Lombardi, for his valuable insights into the project. We also appreciate the support of the Science Learning Research Group.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, Janelle Bailey, upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant Nos. 1721041 and 2027376. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the NSF’s views.