Climate education in the classroom: cloudy with a chance of confusion.

Author: Glenn Branch, Josh Rosenau, Minda Berbeco

Branch, Glenn, et al. “Climate Education in the Classroom: Cloudy with a Chance of Confusion.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 72, no. 2, Mar. 2016, pp. 89–96. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/00963402.2016.1145906.

What affects the way in which climate change is presented in science classes in public middle and high schools in the United States? A new survey suggests that both individual and community factors play a role. The most effective way to improve climate change education is by improving teacher training in the field of climate science. But there are systemic obstacles to teaching about climate change. New state science standards are helping to diminish such obstacles, but these standards, in turn, are provoking a political backlash across the nation. As with public action on climate change in general, public action on climate change education will be furthered by a recognition of the scientific consensus – and what that consensus means.

Keywords: Climate change education; state science standards; climate change; scientific consensus; climate science; state standards; climate

Sunny and Stormy have a lot in common. Both are science teachers in public middle schools in the western United States; both are diligent and dedicated educators; both have a firm commitment to helping their students understand science and its importance. Both, in short, are generally the sort of teacher that you hope your child encounters. But when it comes to climate science, and climate change in particular, the difference is striking – and disturbing. Sunny knows that there is a scientific consensus on the occurrence, causes, and consequences of climate change. She teaches her students accordingly, aware that in a few short years they will need a high degree of climate literacy as workers, consumers, and voters in a warming world. But Stormy thinks that there is a controversy – even a conspiracy – rather than a consensus. While she refrains from inflicting the details of the supposed conspiracy on her students, she emphasizes to them that scientists are unsure about whether human activities are causing the planet to warm.

What is the scientific consensus on climate change, and why is it important? Repeated, independent surveys of climate scientists and of the scientific research literature show that there is overwhelming scientific agreement – upward of 97 percent – that humans are primarily responsible for recent warming trends through the burning of fossil fuels and other activities (Oreskes [18]; Anderegg et al. [ 1]; Cook et al. [ 6]). The climatologist Michael E. Mann recently observed, "Such a high level of agreement among any group of people is extraordinary; just try to get 97 percent of Americans to agree about favorite pizza toppings" (Mann [14]).

The reason for this impressive level of agreement is that in science, objective evidence rather than subjective taste sets the standard. Researchers do not vote, AmericanIdol–style, on the science; rather, they try to let the evidence speak for itself, and agreement emerges. Indeed, the scientific consensus on climate change is clear, even though scientists around the world differ in their religion and their politics, and despite heated conflicts between academic disciplines and individual researchers on a multitude of topics. When a consensus based on multiple lines of evidence emerges despite such diversity, it signals just how robust the underlying findings are.

This scientific consensus on climate change is important because climate change is important. Climate change due to human activity is already affecting the planet and society and will continue to do so for generations to come, through the loss of polar ice and glaciers, the rise of sea level, the increasing acidification of the oceans, and losses of biodiversity and increases in extreme weather events, to list only the most prominent examples. (For a highly accessible review of the relevant science, see Mann and Kump [15].) Efforts to avert the avoidable effects of climate change and to prepare for its unavoidable effects require recognition of the scientific evidence on which the scientific consensus is based.

Although the scientific community is clear about climate change, the American public is unsure, both about climate change and even about the scientific consensus itself. In a recent survey, only 67 percent of the respondents accepted that climate change existed, with only 53 percent attributing global warming to human activities. The average response to the question "What percentage of climate scientists think that human-caused global warming is happening?" was likewise 67 percent (Leiserowitz et al. [12]). The United States is unusual, but not unique, in the developed world for its level of rejection of climate change (Ipsos MORI [10]), owing to a combination of powerful corporate interests and increasing ideological partisanship (Oreskes and Conway [19]).

You might have thought that American science teachers would be immune. After all, science teachers are expected to understand the scientific consensus, appreciate its basis in the evidence, and communicate their understanding to their students. But the American public's confusion on climate change is reflected among American science teachers. The causes are not readily apparent.

Take Sunny and Stormy. Those are not their real names, of course, but they are neither fictitious nor composites. They are real human beings, encountered by staff at the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) through a new teacher outreach program, NCSEteach (http://ncse.com/teach). You might guess that if one of them was a meteorology major in college, it would be Sunny – and you would be right. You might guess that if one of them teaches at a school district in a conservative county in Utah, it would be Stormy – and you would be wrong.

Obviously, there is a limit to how much can be learned from a sample of two. That is why NCSE, working together with researchers from Pennsylvania State University, recently decided to try to determine on a nationwide level how many teachers present the scientific consensus on climate straightforwardly, like Sunny, and how many teachers fail to do so. The results say a lot about why teachers present climate change in the ways that they do – and a lot about how they can be helped.

Surveying teachers on climate

Until recently, the only sources of answers to such questions were two surveys conducted in 2011 by organizations of science teachers, the National Science Teachers Association and the National Earth Science Teachers Association. Comments submitted by the respondents to the National Science Teachers Association survey showed that denial, misrepresentation, and avoidance were prevalent: "I am teaching my students that there is little to no evidence that climate change is [hu]manmade," said one teacher. "[I] make it more of a debate," said a second. "Other science teachers seem to avoid anything controversial," said a third (Petrinjak [20]). The National Earth Science Teachers Association survey showed that, of 555 kindergarten to 12th grade educators who teach climate change, 47 percent taught "both sides" of climate change – misrepresenting it as controversial (Johnson and Holzer [11]). Although these studies are suggestive, neither used a random sampling technique to ensure that a truly representative sample of teachers was examined.

In 2014, researchers at Pennsylvania State University and NCSE undertook the first nationally representative survey of science educators focused on climate change. Data from 1500 science teachers in public middle and high schools in all 50 states were collected using state-of-the-art methods in survey research. The survey used a detailed questionnaire to gather a range of data that was overlooked by the two previous surveys. The teachers answered questions about the classes and topics they teach, the strategies they adopt in teaching about climate change, their state's science standards and standardized tests, the textbooks and supplementary materials they use, their personal views on climate change, their training in preparation to become teachers, their continuing education since becoming teachers, and their personal background, including their ethnicity, religion, and politics. And when the surveys were collected and tallied, there was good news and bad news.

On the one hand, there was evidence that plenty of science teachers are presenting climate change to their students. Three in four science teachers, including 70 percent of middle school teachers and 87 percent of high school biology teachers, reported devoting at least one hour to discussing climate change; the average amount of time devoted to it was a shade over four hours – about a week's worth of classes. Since practically all students take middle school science and practically all high school graduates will have taken high school biology, the chance of them encountering climate change is quite high. Teachers reported presenting concepts, such as the greenhouse effect and the carbon cycle, that are essential to understanding climate change. They also reported discussing observable consequences of climate change, such as sea level rise, and possible responses to mitigate and adapt to climate change, such as improving the efficiency of technology. Only a few teachers reported encountering pressure not to teach climate change. All of these results are encouraging.

On the other hand, there was evidence that plenty of teachers are not doing quite so well. Less than 1 in 10 endorsed avoiding the topic of climate change altogether as a way to avoid the controversy. But one in three reported that they emphasize that many scientists believe that recent increases in temperature are probably due to natural causes – which, of course, is contrary to the scientific evidence about the causes of climate change – and 1 in 10 of the teachers emphasize only that claim. One in four teachers send mixed signals, reporting that they emphasize the "natural causes" claim as well as the scientific consensus that humans have caused most of the recent warming. Why are they doing so? It is suggestive that, when asked to indicate "What proportion of climate scientists think that global warming is caused mostly by human activities" and offered five choices, only 30 percent of middle school and 45 percent of high school science teachers selected the correct answer: 81–100 percent. One in five ventured no guess. Even among teachers who accepted the consensus view themselves, only 52 percent selected the correct answer.

Factors affecting the teaching of climate change

What influences teachers to present the scientific consensus on climate straightforwardly, and what influences them to deny it outright, misrepresent it as controversial, use questionable tactics to defuse the controversy, or avoid the topic altogether? Because there are robust correlations in the general public between political and religious beliefs and the acceptance of climate change, it is not surprising that the same should be the case with educators (Figure 1). Teachers' political and religious beliefs are correlated not only with their acceptance or rejection of climate change but also with the ways they teach about climate change (Figure 2). The survey found that teachers who identified as Republicans, teachers who regarded the Bible as the actual word of God to be taken literally, and teachers who favored libertarian and small-government views were all less likely to emphasize the scientific consensus on climate change and more likely to air opposing views in the classroom. Republicans and Biblical literalists, but not libertarians, were less likely to try to defuse the controversy (by, e.g., allowing students to opt out of those portions of the class in which climate change is discussed).

Graph: Figure 1. In a national survey by researchers at Penn State University and the National Center for Science Education, public school science teachers were asked to estimate what percent of scientists agree that humans are causing modern climate change (the figure is 97 percent). Awareness of this figure is a strong predictor of personal acceptance of climate science and an individual teacher's willingness to teach it forthrightly. The most liberal teachers – those who most agree with the statement "Sometimes government needs to make laws that keep people from harming themselves" – gave higher estimates than those who preferred "It's not the government's business to try to protect people from themselves." Red indicates the degree that teachers' views are shaped by lack of information or active disinformation, while gray shows the effects of ideology. In a nutshell, the more educators are aware of the 97 percent statistic, the more likely they are to accept climate change as a fact and treat it as such in class.

Graph: Figure 2. Religious background and ideology also play a role in teachers' perception of the strength of the scientific consensus about climate change. To identify evangelical Christians (and others with conservative theologies), participants were asked whether they regard the Bible as "the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word-for-word," or it as "the inspired word of God" but not to be taken literally, or as "an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by man." Teachers who believe the Bible is to be taken literally are far less likely to know that the overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree that humanity has caused – and continues to cause – climate change. The effect of religious ideology is depicted here in the area between the two lines labeled "Biblical literalist" and "Not Biblical literalist."

But the community also shapes teaching practices. As Michael B. Berkman and Eric Plutzer observe in their Evolution, Creationism, and the Battle to Control America's Classrooms ([ 2]), teachers may be "street-level bureaucrats," enacting policies set by the state and federal governments, but they also serve the local public and are held accountable if they diverge too far from the expectations of their local communities. Consequently, the survey found that in states with less acceptance of climate change (as measured by Howe et al. [ 9]), teachers were more likely to use defusing tactics – or even avoid discussing the topic entirely. Teachers in such states were also less willing to emphasize the level of scientific consensus about climate change. They were also more likely to succumb to the temptation of offering false balance when discussing climate change. These effects were strongly predicted by the degree of climate change acceptance in their counties, especially when those counties are less accepting of climate science than the statewide population. State and county voting patterns are similarly predictive (Figure 3). All this suggests that teachers in large part take their cues from their communities. But it is possible that teachers overestimate the degree of resistance to climate change in their school districts, in much the same way that state politicians overestimate the degree of political conservatism among their constituents (Broockman and Skovron [ 4]).

Graph: Figure 3. Comparing teachers based on the politics of their communities makes it possible to distinguish the effect of personal politics from community politics on a teacher's climate literacy and methods and practice of teaching. Teachers from counties with the highest percentage of Democratic votes in the last presidential election were more likely to know that the overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree that humanity is causing climate change than teachers from counties with the highest share of Republican votes. The area between the two lines shows the additional effect of community pressure beyond personal political ideology. To be specific, the more Republican their peers, the more likely that teachers will believe in small government and be unaware of the consensus on climate change among climate scientists.

Graph: Figure 4. Science teachers with the most training in the climate science field were more likely than those with the least training to know that the overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree that humanity is causing climate change. In this chart, the area between the line marked "Most trained" and the one labeled "Least trained" shows the impact of training in climate science beyond the effect of a teacher's political ideology.

The amount of training teachers had in the field of climate science was also important (Figure 4). In the survey, those who correctly responded that 81–100 percent of scientists agree that global warming is caused mostly by human activities were significantly more likely to emphasize the scientific consensus – and less likely to present it as a matter for debate. They were also less likely to attempt to defuse the issue by allowing students to opt out of the portions of the class in which climate change is discussed. Meanwhile, teachers who personally accepted the scientific consensus were also more likely to emphasize the consensus in their teaching and to teach the topic forthrightly. Teachers who considered themselves more expert on climate change were more likely to emphasize the scientific consensus, especially if they had taken college or continuing education classes that covered climate change. Those who had taken such classes were also less likely to introduce false balance into their classrooms.

The survey results suggest that providing training in the science behind climate change to teachers is the key to ensuring that there are more teachers like Sunny. Shifts in personal and community beliefs are not easy to effect through public policy, but it is surely possible to improve teacher training. And when it comes to climate change, there is plenty of room for improvement. Less than half of the teachers in the survey took a course in college that devoted as much as one class session to climate change. And climate change is comparatively neglected in continuing education activities for teachers. Of the 1000-plus sessions slated for the National Science Teachers Association's national conference in 2016, for example, only 15 are on climate change. Climate change deniers are eager to fill that vacuum: 14 percent of the teachers surveyed indicated that they tried to keep current on climate science by visiting climate-change-denial websites.

At least it is an encouraging sign that two in three of the surveyed teachers would take a continuing education class entirely focused on climate change if it were available to them. But will teachers with expertise in climate change have a chance to share it with their students?

Finding a home for climate science

There are systemic obstacles to teaching climate science in the United States. The classes where it would be natural to discuss climate change intensively – earth sciences, ocean sciences, atmospheric sciences, environmental sciences, and the like – are comparatively neglected. Geology, for example, "was formalized in American public schools after other sciences and historically has had to fight for equal status among its sister sciences," observed Elizabeth B. Lewis in a historical survey of earth science education (Lewis [13]). The fight is still not over: According to a 2015 study, only two states require a year-long earth or environmental science course for graduation from high school, while 30 require a year-long life science course, and 20 require a year-long physical science course (Center for Geoscience and Society [ 5]). Instead, high school students bound for college are often marched through a rigid sequence of biology, chemistry, and physics. Although it is possible – indeed appropriate and desirable – to discuss climate change in the course of a biology, chemistry, or physics class, the teachers of such courses have generally not been trained, encouraged, and provided with the resources to do so.

Recent sets of state science education standards are starting to rectify the neglect, although indirectly. Teachers are not consulting the standards themselves on a day-by-day basis. But the standards do provide guidelines for local school districts to follow in developing their science curricula, determine the content of statewide science examinations, and are consulted by textbook publishers in developing their textbooks.

And it will take some time for the state standards to have an impact. California, for instance, adopted a new set of science standards that acknowledge the reality of climate change in 2013, but a recent study of sixth-grade science textbooks still in use in the state reported, "the textbooks more closely match the public discourse of doubt about climate change rather than the scientific discourse. The message was that climate change is possibly happening, that humans may or may not be causing it, and that we do not need to take immediate mitigating action" (Román and Busch [22]). The next crop of textbooks, to be introduced in classrooms in 2018, may be expected, however, to match the new standards.

The bottom line is that the inclusion of climate change in state science standards matters, because it leads, even if indirectly and gradually, to the inclusion of climate change in the classroom.

A particularly important development is the advent of the Next Generation Science Standards, finalized in 2013. Based on a framework devised by the National Research Council, these standards treat global climate change as one of four sub-ideas in the core idea of "Earth and Human Activity," at both the middle school and the high school level. Middle school students, for example, are expected to "[a]sk questions to clarify evidence of the factors that have caused the rise in global temperatures over the past century," and a note refers to "the major role that human activities play in causing the rise in global temperatures" (NGSS Lead States [17]). High school students are expected to "[u]se a computational representation to illustrate the relationships among Earth systems and how those relationships are being modified due to human activity," and a note gives the example of ocean acidification. The Next Generation Science Standards were a state-led effort, and it is up to individual states to decide whether to adopt them. Already 17 states have adopted them, and a few states have adopted new standards that, while not the Next Generation Science Standards per se, reflect their influence.

The treatment of climate change in the Next Generation Science Standards, though scientifically uncontroversial, was politically controversial in several states. In Iowa and Michigan, bills to block the adoption of the standards were introduced owing to their treatment of climate change; in Wyoming, such a bill was not only introduced – by a legislator who complained that the standards "handle global warming as settled science" – but also passed. (The legislature later reversed the decision, although Wyoming's state board of education subsequently voted not to adopt the standards.) Citing the interests of the state's coal industry, West Virginia's state board of education tampered with the Next Generation Science Standards before voting to adopt them. When asked why climate change was the area of science that he was especially concerned about, one board member responded: "West Virginia coal in particular has been taking on unfair negativity from certain groups" (Quinn [21]). After a public outcry, the board backpedaled from its changes, but still insisted on revisions that seemed intended to open the classroom door, at least a crack, to climate change denial.

Beyond state science standards

Such efforts are not restricted to blocking the Next Generation Science Standards; they are characteristic of attempts of climate change deniers to undermine climate education. They have occurred at every level of educational governance. In July 2015, climate-change-denying Senator Roger Wicker (R–Mississippi) unsuccessfully attempted to amend a major education bill to direct the federal government to provide "balanced, objective resources on climate theory," emphasizing uncertainty and ignoring human influence on climate (Foran [ 7]).

At the state level, there is a constant trickle of legislation citing global warming – often alongside evolution – as a topic so controversial that science teachers have to be given carte blanche to teach it as they please without any oversight from state or local administrators. In 2013, for example, such bills were introduced in Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, and Oklahoma. Such bills are often based on a model bill circulated by a creationist organization, the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (Matzke [16]). (They are sometimes attributed to the American Legislative Exchange Council, but the evidence for a connection is scant [Branch [ 3]].) Such efforts can also be found at the level of the local school district, where policies are sometimes adopted that directly or indirectly require teachers to present scientifically dubious material for the sake of "balance."

In the individual classroom, teachers are sometimes pressured by students, parents, colleagues, administrators, or members of the general public – including climate change denial organizations such as the Heartland Institute, which have repeatedly targeted teachers with mass mailings. In 2012, this climate-change-denying organization was reportedly working on a global warming curriculum that described global warming as scientifically controversial (Gillis and Kaufman [ 8]). The curriculum seems never to have materialized, but teachers have reported receiving unsolicited materials from the Heartland Institute in the following years; a teacher in North Carolina described it to NCSE as a "campaign of obfuscation." The intended effect, of course, is to advance denial, ambiguity, and avoidance on the part of teachers – in short, to discourage teachers like Sunny.

The shining example of Sunny notwithstanding, it would be unrealistic to expect teachers in general to be able to overcome the challenges to teaching climate change on their own with no support from their districts, communities, and states. To ensure that climate change is taught accurately, honestly, and confidently, teachers must receive improved training in climate science and climate education (as the survey of teachers suggests), standards and curricula must be reformed to supply the connections between climate lessons across classrooms, and communities must support climate education as a key element in preparing citizens of a world shaped by climate change.

These are lofty goals, and there is no denying that there are obstacles, both financial and systemic, to accomplishing them. But arguably the main obstacle on all three fronts is the so-called consensus gap (discussed by the Consensus Project, http://theconsensusproject.com/): the fact that the public – including teachers – is generally unaware of the robustness of the scientific consensus on the occurrence, causes, and consequences of climate change. It is plausible, and moreover corroborated by experimental evidence (van der Linden et al. [23]), to think that support for public action on climate change requires closing the consensus gap.

This is especially true with regard to science education. And upgrading the place of climate science in science education is especially important, for classrooms may be the best place to begin to close the consensus gap. But that will only happen if concerned citizens, including the scientists whose work has contributed to that consensus, support teachers as they adapt to the changing climate of climate education.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Eric Plutzer, Mark McCaffrey, A. Lee Hannah, and Ann H. Reid for their work on the survey discussed here, the respondents to the survey themselves for their time, and Reid also for her comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Footnotes

1 Present address: National Center for Science Education (NCSE), 420 40th Street Suite #2, Oakland, CA, USA

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By Glenn Branch; Josh Rosenau and Minda Berbeco

Reported by Author; Author; Author

Glenn Branch is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education. He was the co-editor, with Eugenie C. Scott, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools, and author or coauthor of numerous articles on creationism and evolution in such publications as Scientific American, The American Biology Teacher, and the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics.

Josh Rosenau is programs and policy director at the National Center for Science Education. His expertise ranges from biological diversity and biogeography to legal and constitutional barriers to teaching creationism in public schools and public opinion about science and science education. Rosenau has written on these topics for publications, including Scientific American, the Washington Post, Trends in Microbiology, Seed, and Science Progress.

Minda Berbeco is programs and policy director at the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). She earned her PhD in biology from Tufts University, where she researched the effects of climate change on terrestrial systems, and subsequently was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Davis. She has written about challenges to climate change science and education for the Washington Post, The American Biology Teacher, The Science Teacher, and Live Science. At NCSE, she recently launched a new teacher outreach program, NCSEteach (http://ncse.com/teach).

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