Why words matter - The framing of climate change in school science [electronic resource]
Keywords: Education.

Even though climate change will have a profound impact on today's youth, many American teenagers do not perceive it as a risk nor are they taking mitigating actions. A nationally representative survey conducted in the United States showed that 57% of American teenagers are not worried about climate change and only 15% are taking mitigating action to decrease their carbon footprint. Several explanations exist for this lack of concern and action; some argue that youth are lacking the scientific knowledge required to understand climate change. To be sure, the majority of the science education research literature addresses this possibility by providing exhaustive accounts of student misconceptions. However, research indicates that knowledge is only indirectly associated with intent to take action. What, then, are other possible explanations? Another possible explanation is that youth see climate change as uncertain and, therefore, do not consider it to be a serious risk. Only 54% believe that climate change is occurring and only 35% of youth understand the scientific consensus about climate change. This is problematic because uncertainty can serve as a major obstacle to pro-environmental behavior. Although these youth are considered "the climate generation, " having grown up with increasing scientific certainty, these are also the same students who have lived through the maelstrom of misinformation within some political commentaries and mass media outlets. An additional possible explanation is that students do not see the relevance of climate change to their everyday lived experience. And, indeed, only 19% of youth report that it is very important to them personally. Drawing on theory and methods from the field of communication, the focus of this dissertation will be the communication, and in particular, the framing, of uncertainty and relevance within the school setting. Thus, the research question for this dissertation is: How is climate change being framed in school science? Framing theory has been used to understand how language choices made by those in mass media affect the audience's intention to act. Both the media and individuals use frames as "interpretive storylines that set a specific train of thought in motion, communicating why an issue might be a problem, who or what might be responsible for it, and what should be done about it" (Nisbet, 2009, p.16). Framing links macro-level and micro-level processes between society, the media, and individuals in the audience. Communication scholars have identified three such processes: 1) frame building, 2) frame setting, and 3) the individual-level effects of framing. I have adapted the theoretical framework used to study the media to the educational setting and argue that it can help us to understand how the use of language in educational contexts may affect students' intention to act. At the macro level, the teacher and textbook writers make choices when frame building based on ideologies, their own personal beliefs and attitudes, the school context, and other community and social influences. During the frame setting process, the frames are presented to the students. Frames are enacted as teachers talk about climate change in their lectures or when students engage with materials, such as textbooks. At the micro level, the students will employ their own individual frames to define what they see as the issue and decide whether to take action. Students bring with them their own sets of personal experiences and attitudes, which they will use when engaging with the topic of climate change in the classroom. In this three-paper dissertation, one paper addresses each of these three framing processes in an effort to validate the proposed theoretical framework. To explore the frame-building process, the language used in the climate change section of four sixth grade science textbooks adopted in the state of California was closely examined. The research questions for this study were: 1) How does the language used in science textbooks indicate how certain scientists are that climate change is occurring? and 2) How are human beings positioned as the causes of or the solution for climate change? In collaboration with a linguistics scholar, systemic functional linguistic analysis methods were used to characterize the texts' representation of uncertainty and attribution. The linguistic variables investigated were: types of nominal groups; processes; circumstances; and the modality system. The findings showed that these textbooks framed climate change as uncertain in the scientific community—both about whether it is occurring as well as about its human-causation. One California textbook, for example, states: "Some scientists think that the 0.7 Celsius degree rise in global temperatures over the past 120 years may be due in part to natural variations in climate." Through the use of indeterminate quantifiers ("some") and modal verbs ("may"), the textbook is creating a flawed understanding of the level and sources of uncertainty about climate change. Although uncertainty is an inherent part of science, in this case, we argue that the textbook language is being built from the deliberately manufactured discourse of doubt about climate change, which has served as an impediment to US citizens taking necessary mitigating action. Therefore, it was hypothesized that the uncertainty found in school textbooks will decrease students' concern and willingness to take action. To investigate the frame-setting process, the second paper aims to understand: How do teachers frame climate change in the classroom? To answer this research question, twenty-five lectures about climate change from seven teachers were analyzed using semiotic discourse analysis methods. Using a correlational analysis, it was found that teachers' frames overlapped to form two distinct discourses: a Science Discourse and a Social Discourse. The dominant Science Discourse can be summarized as: Climate change is a current scientific problem that will have profound global effects on the Earth's physical systems. The Social Discourse, used much less often, can be summarized as: Climate change is a future social issue because it will have negative impacts on people at the local level. While it is not surprising that the Science Discourse was heard most often in these science classrooms, the communication research literature on individual-level effects of framing indicates that the frames found in the Science Discourse -- global scale, scientific statistics and facts, and impact on the Earth's systems -- are not likely to inspire concern or action. In contrast, the frames found within the Social Discourse -- local scale, impact on humans, and connections to social, economic, and political processes -- are more likely to inspire action by increasing personal relevance. To examine the individual-level effects of the framing process, the third paper reports on an experiment testing two framings of uncertainty on students' intent to take action to mitigate climate change. Additionally, to explore possible mechanisms involved in the individual-level effects of framing process, several factors highlighted within the behavior theory literature were measured both prior to the treatment and then again after. The factors explored in the study were: knowledge, certainty, affect (emotions), efficacy, and social norms. Therefore, the research questions investigated in this study were: 1) What knowledge and attitudes about climate change do students bring with them to the classroom setting?; 2) How does the framing of uncertainty influence how students come to understand climate change?; and 3) How do knowledge, certainty, efficacy, and social norms relate to students' pro-environmental behaviors? The experiment was conducted with 453 middle and high school students from five schools within the Bay Area. The schools were a mixture of private, public, and public charter. Findings indicated that these students did hold a basic understanding of the causes and effects of climate change. They were worried and felt negatively about the topic. They felt somewhat efficacious about their personal ability to mitigate climate change, and they ascribed more efficacy to "people's" ability to reduce climate change. The students reported that they associated with people who were more likely to think climate change was real and caused by humans. Students also reported that they often take part in private pro-environmental behaviors such as using less electricity and recycling. When asked to respond freely to a question about what think about climate change, participants described the negative effects of human-caused climate change on Earth systems at the global scale and as a current phenomenon. The results of the experiment showed that while the text portraying climate change with high uncertainty did affect student's own certainty and their perception of scientists' certainty, it did not affect behavioral intention. This result can be explained through regression analysis. It was found that efficacy and social norms were found to be direct determinants of pro-environmental behaviors for the issue of climate change for the youth in this study. The cognitive variables -- knowledge and certainty -- and the psychological variable -- affect -- were not significant predictors of pro-environmental behavior. The implications for this last study are that while students hold basic understanding of the causes and effects of climate change, this understanding lacks personal relevance. Another implication of this study is that if we wish to have action-taking as an outcome of climate change education efforts, then the learning activities should include components to address efficacy and social norms. Taken together, these three studies provide validation for the proposed theoretical model of framing within an educational ... .