Influence of academic education vs. common culture on the climate literacy of university students / Formación académica frente a cultura común en la alfabetización climática de estudiantes universitarios

Abstract

This article compares the level of climate literacy observed among university students enrolled on different academic courses, sampled at the start and end of their degrees (N = 1,149). The study involved distributing a questionnaire about various scientific topics related to Climate Change (CC) and aims to analyse the extent to which differences can be attributed to the influence of the social representations of common culture or to the scientific education received during their academic studies. The initial assumption made is that students who study natural science or engineering degrees and those who are in the final years of their degree course should be significantly more competent regarding the questions made to them than students studying social sciences or humanities and those who are at the start of their university degree. The weight of common culture is also noted as the decisive factor in predominant social representations.

Improvement on Social Representation of Climate Change through a Knowledge-Based MOOC in Spanish

“…The results from the questionnaires applied to students of the Universidad de Granada (Spain) and the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (Spain) reveal that, even though students from Natural Sciences degrees scored higher in the items related to the knowledge of physical and chemical processes and causes and consequences of Climate Change than students of Social Sciences, they still failed to identify false statements, which means that their SR contains misconceptions. This study, hereafter referred to as the "Resclima study" [48], describes the technical details of the 32-item questionnaire that we used in this study.…”

“…The difference in the number of students who completed the pretest and posttest is indicative of the MOOC completion rate. We compared results from our sample with those obtained by the research group from the USC in the "Resclima study" [48]. They applied a non-probabilistic and intentional sampling to four hundred eighty-eight college students, with a mean age of 20.5; 42.8% of the participants were men and 57.2% were women.…”

“…The questionnaire employed in the present study was developed during the Resclima project at USC [46][47][48] and was used to test the first dimension of the SR among students of a MOOC on the Science of Climate Change. The technical details of the questionnaire can be found in the "Resclima study" [48]. The 32 items of the questionnaire can be found in Appendix A.…”

“…The first section is a demographic analysis of the participants including questions related to age, sex, level of studies, country of origin, etc. The second section, which has been introduced previously in the "Resclima study" [48], consists of 32 items designed to explore the participant's interactions between scientific and common culture. The questionnaire measures student's competence through the identification of the scientific veracity of a series of statements, which are classified into four areas of knowledge related to the design of MOOC materials.…”

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“…Desde el sector de la Educación Ambiental se empieza a reclamar un currículo de emergencia climática (Meira-Cartea et al, 2018;Resclima, 2018), el desarrollo de habilidades digitales y tecnológicas capaces de establecer vínculos entre la sociedad y la tecnología que permitan participar en procesos participativos en los que las personas incorporemos criterios de sostenibilidad, feminismos y justicia global en las decisiones que se tomen , con el fin de conseguir una cultura del cuidado del clima (Heras, 2016) que, irremediablemente, pase por establecer líneas de trabajo con población excluida como mujeres, niñas (Limón & Solís, 2014).…”