Susan Marie Buhr

Clarifying Climate Confusion: Addressing Systemic Holes, Cognitive Gaps, and Misconceptions Through Climate Literacy

The challenge of significantly increasing the publics climate literacy is a daunting one. While polling research indicates that most American adults believe climate change is happening, the data also show there is widespread confusion about the causes of the change and the degree of scientific consensus around the human impacts on the climate system. Consumers and corporations, who may lack an understanding of the important role of carbon in the climate system, are encouraged to reduce carbon emissions, purchase carbon offsets, and consider carbon labels that show the amount of embedded greenhouse gases in products and services. Utility companies promoting the use of smart meters find that many consumers do not understand how their electricity is generated or the role played by fossil fuels, which are in effect concentrated forms of buried solar energy linking energy use today to past and future climates. While aggressive media, corporate, and political forces are often regarded as the primary cause of the publics climate confusion, a review of five decades of science education relating to climate in general and climate change in particular reveals that basic climate science has not been well addressed in national and state education standards or science education curricula. Moreover, key misconceptions and misinformation about basic climate science are strongly held by students, teachers, and public audiences. We review research on these misconceptions and call upon educators and communicators to address systemic holes and pedagogical gaps with high-quality resources and professional development. The recently developed Essential Principles of Climate Literacy provides an authoritative, comprehensive framework for educators and communicators to frame climate science. However, to be effectively used as a tool for increasing broad climate literacy, effective mental models to address misconceptions will need to be integral to the high-quality resources and professional development programs required to significantly increase climate literacy throughout society.

Peer-Review of Digital Educational Resources—A Rigorous Review Process Developed by the Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN)

ABSTRACT Educators seek to develop 21st century skills in the classroom by incorporating educational materials other than textbooks into their lessons, such as digitally available activities, videos, and visualizations. A problem that educators face is that no review process similar to the formal adoption processes used for K–12 textbooks or the college-textbook review process exists for these types of online educational resources. However, educators need authoritative high-quality digital teaching materials. The scientific journal peer-review system offers a well-established model to adapt to the requirements of a peer review of educational materials. In this paper, we review ten review processes developed to evaluate digital geoscience educational resources and focus in detail on a rigorous iterative peer-review process recently developed by the Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN) project. This process builds upon existing efforts and emphasizes the “curation” of a digital collection that addresses the Essential Principles of Climate Literacy and the Energy Literacy Principles. Providing educators with thoroughly reviewed educational materials is especially important for fast changing, societally important, and sensitive areas such as climate and energy science.

“Hidden” threats to science education

Many readers of Eos are involved with education. Most would agree that what happens at precollege levels will ultimately affect the geoscience profession; after all, future scientists are todays precollege students. While a growing number of scientists are working to improve the quality of precollege programs, only a few are addressing what we term the “hidden” threats to science education. Hidden threats have nothing to do with scientific content; rather, they result from social, political, and bureaucratic forces operating within and outside of schools and universities.

The DLESE evaluation services group: a framework for evaluation within a digital library

The Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) Evaluation Services Core (ESC) team has been established to provide evaluation support for DLESE core team activities; establish pilot studies with key user audiences (e.g. K-12 teachers and undergraduate faculty); implement studies designed to better characterize DLESE users and user needs; and offer evaluation support and opportunities for the DLESE community through workshops and grant opportunities. This article is intended to describe the breadth and depth of our work