Faculty Publications

Document Type

Presentation

Publication Date

April 2019

Publication Title

AERA

Keywords

Environmental Education, Science Education

Disciplines

Education | Elementary Education

Abstract

In this paper, we report an estimate of the magnitude of the “consensus gap” – the gap between what scientists know about climate change and what the general public thinks they know – about anthropomorphic climate change among K-8 pre-service teachers. We also report qualitative findings about the utility of a four-faceted approach to teaching about climate change designed explicitly to mitigate inductive reasoning errors and to reduce in-group favoritism, attribution bias, inter-group conflict, and confirmation bias. We found that learning about the scientific consensus spurred student exploration about climate change and the careful use of deliberation toward commonly-held positions within a caring learning community rather than the more common ‘debate’ style of discussion fostered deep reflection.

Comments

Paper presented at the 2019 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.
Paper presented as part of the session: Science Teaching and Learning SIG Paper Session: Preservice Teachers
This paper is also available in the AERA Online Paper Repository.
Each presenter retains copyright on the full-text paper. Repository users should follow legal and ethical practices in their use of repository material; permission to reuse material must be sought from the presenter, who owns copyright. Users should be aware of the AERA Code of Ethics.

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