Climate change as a means of exploring 8th grade students' epistemologies of science in traditional and place-based learning environments

Earth and her inhabitants face a looming climate crisis. It will be up to the younger generation, many having yet to begin high school, to bear the brunt of the negative effects of climate change while coming up with solutions to mitigate against and adapt to a warming globe. Helping students construct a deep understanding of the science of climate change includes aiding them in deciding what to believe, how to differentiate between empirical evidence and opinion, and why certain claims are more valid than others. At their core these are epistemic challenges and the purpose of the work outlined here is to uncover relationships between students’ climate literacy and their epistemic orientations, and the impact different learning environments have on the development of those ideas.

This dissertation contributes to the climate change education literature by examining how students’ epistemic orientations towards science shape their beliefs about climate change in the context of traditional and place-based learning environments. This led to two separate but related studies. The 1st paper analyzed results from Likert survey instruments, combined with student responses to semi-structured interviews to investigate the relationships between climate literacy and epistemic orientation of science. The 2nd article used a case study approach to explore the role that different learning environments played in developing students’ ideas about climate change and the nature of science knowledge. Taken together, these studies have implications for how teachers engage adolescents with the topic of climate change and the construction of knowledge in the science classroom.