Assessing Students' Epistemologies of Science in the Context of a Unit on Weather & Climate Change

Climate change is among the most pressing issues facing our society today. Until recently, the topic of climate change was not something that received much attention in educational settings outside of secondary and university classrooms. With the recent adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards, now middle-school-aged students are being tasked with developing models to explain how uneven heating from the Sun can lead to local and regional weather and climate patterns here on Earth, and come up with questions to investigate the impacts that humans have on Earth's changing climate system. How students come to understand the topic of climate change, what they chose to believe, and what they take as true present epistemic challenges for classroom teachers. Must students have a more developed epistemic orientation towards the nature of science prior to accepting the findings of the climate science community? Does science literacy influence climate literacy? To answer these questions a pair of Likert survey instruments that measure students' epistemic frameworks related to science, and their beliefs and attitudes about climate change were administered to a group of 180 eighth grade students from three public school districts in the state of Iowa during the spring semester of 2019. Survey responses were analyzed using a Rasch modeling approach. To support findings from the survey instruments, interviews with roughly 40 students were conducted prior to and following a unit on weather and climate. Initial findings from correlational analysis suggest that students with more informed epistemologies of science tend to more readily endorse ideas about climate change that align with the climate science community. Qualitative analysis of interview transcripts suggest that students who understand that Earth's climate is changing and that humans play a role in that process also tended to espouse more informed views about the epistemic nature of science. A topic like climate change that is characterized by it's reliance on modeling, uncertainty, and debate within the scientific community (and public) may provide a vehicle by which students are able to develop a deeper sense of science literacy. The impact that different learning environments may have on such findings and other educational implications will also be discussed.