Complex influences of mechanistic knowledge, worldview, and quantitative reasoning on climate change discourse: Evidence for ideologically motivated reasoning among youth

Abstract

Anthropogenic climate change remains divisive in the United States, where skepticism of the scientific consensus is associated with conservative worldviews, resulting in political polarization. This study considers three hypotheses regarding U.S. polarization over climate change that have emerged from social psychology research and applies them to science education by showing how these hypotheses could relate to adolescents' science learning. We then test each hypothesis within an experimental educational intervention designed to study the influence of worldview, mechanistic knowledge, and quantitative reasoning on students' written arguments about climate change. We used mixed methods to analyze the results of this individually randomized trial with clustering involving 357 participants in grades 9-11 from 5 U.S. sites. Findings show that: (a) exposure to mechanistic knowledge about climate change increased odds of receptivity toward climate change; (b) increasingly conservative worldviews were associated with decreased odds of receptivity; (c) worldview and quantitative reasoning interacted, resulting in an amplified effect of worldview for students with greater quantitative reasoning. Results also suggest that the influence of worldview and mechanistic knowledge on receptivity work

Elite Cues and the Rapid Decline in Trust in Science Agencies on COVID-19

“…All models in Table 3 include education × party interaction terms. Education × party effects, or similar interactions involving other knowledge and political indicators, have been found in previous studies to affect responses on science trust (Hamilton, Hartter, and Saito 2015;) and many other science-related topics (Drummond and Fischhoff 2017;Hamilton 2008Hamilton , 2011Hamilton, Cutler, and Schaefer 2012;Hamilton, Hartter, Lemcke-Stampone, et al 2015;Kahan et al 2011;McCright and Dunlap 2011;Shao et al 2014;Tranter 2019;Zummo, Donovan, and Busch 2021). Their usual form is that trust in scientists rises with education among Democrats and Independents (or liberals and moderates), but stays level or declines with education among the most conservative.…”

Unpacking the connections between 8th graders' climate literacy and epistemic cognition

“…Rasch modeling has broad application within the field of science education as a rigorous approach for development, revision, or validation of assessment tools in the geosciences (Libarkin & Anderson, 2006), nature of science (Harrison et al, 2015;Neumann et al, 2011), epistemic beliefs (Fulmer, 2014), argumentation (Osborne et al, 2016), science reasoning (Fulmer et al, 2015), self-efficacy (Boone et al, 2011), and interdisciplinary science (Yang et al, 2018), among others. Within the context of climate science education, Rasch analysis has been used to assess the factors that impact students' perceived risks of climate change (Aksit et al, 2018;Boon, 2016;Libarkin et al, 2018), understanding of climate change and socioscientific reasoning (Eggert et al, 2017), the conceptions of climate change held by middle school students , and the influence of quantitative reasoning on learners' discourse related to climate change (Zummo et al, 2021).…”

“…Is one's climate literacy affected by their epistemic cognition? We suspect this to be the case, particularly with younger learners whose epistemic cognition may still be under development and who may be unduly influenced by arguments that refute the findings of the climate science community (Zummo et al, 2021). We believe that helping students construct an understanding of the science content behind climate change includes aiding them in deciding what to believe, how to differentiate between empirical evidence and misinformation, and why certain claims are more valid than others.…”

“…In addition to numerous economic and social issues, climate change provides its own unique set of hurdles for classroom science teachers to overcome. In preparing young learners to one day participate in the public discourse around climate change, science teachers are charged with helping students develop a conceptual understanding of the complex mechanisms that lead to climate change (Shepardson et al, 2011;Visintainer & Linn, 2015;Zummo et al, 2021) while also providing guidance as learners navigate through a myriad of resources that often contain misinformation (Sinatra & Lombardi, 2020) and competing claims (Lombardi et al, 2016). When learning about Earth's climate, one needs to grasp the content and conceptual knowledge of climate change in addition to the empirical nature of science as a way of knowing through the development of tentative explanations of cause and effect relationships based on evidence (Bell et al, 2011;Bell & Lederman, 2003).…”

“…When learning about Earth's climate, one needs to grasp the content and conceptual knowledge of climate change in addition to the empirical nature of science as a way of knowing through the development of tentative explanations of cause and effect relationships based on evidence (Bell et al, 2011;Bell & Lederman, 2003). While knowledge remains a critical component of climate literacy, there is growing evidence that simply providing learners with more information about climate change does not go far enough in helping to overcome climate skepticism (Zummo et al, 2021), or motivating behavior that would contribute to the mitigation of climate change (Busch et al, 2019b).…”