Designing Climate Change Learning to Support Personal and Local Relevance in Decision Making

• In Event: Epistemic Agency and Equity

Abstract

With the goal of supporting student decision-making about climate change, an instructional intervention was developed to anchor chemistry concepts in personally and locally relevant experiences of students. The intervention was set in an urban classroom to explore how a community-oriented framing of climate science supports students’ content knowledge and decision-making. Using a pre-post test design, we found a statistically significant increase in students’ content knowledge and students’ use of both school-based and community-based scientific concepts in decisions about local adaptations. This work contributes to research on how socio-scientific issues can support urban youth in learning climate science and has implications for understanding what classroom experiences beyond “just science” are needed to fully support youth in engaging with climate change.

Authors

• Heather F. Clark, University of California - Los Angeles

• William A. Sandoval, University of California - Los Angeles