Raising climate literacy through addressing misinformation: Case studies in agnotology-based learning

Journal of Geoscience Education

Volumn 62, Issue 3, 2014, Pages 296-306

  Cook, John ^a,b   Bedford, Daniel ^c   Mandia, Scott ^d  

^a UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND   (Australia)

^b UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA   (Australia)

^c WEBER STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^d SUFFOLK COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

Agnotology; Climate change; Misinformation; Scientific consensus

Indexed keywords

EID: 84908111722     PISSN: 10899995     EISSN: 21581428     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5408/13-071.1     Document Type: Note

References (74)

1. AAP. Study consensus for global warming. The Australian, 16 May 2013. Available at http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/breaking-news/study-consensus-for-global-warming/storyfn3dxix6-1226644310095 (accessed 3 June 2013).
2. Ackerman, F. 2008. Hot, it’s not: Reflections on Cool It!, by Bjorn Lomborg. Climatic Change 89(3), 435-446.
3. Allegre, C., Armstrong, J.S., Breslow, J., Cohen, R., David, E., Happer, W., Kelly, M., Kininmonth, W., Lindzen, R., McGrath, J., Nichols, R., Rutan, B., Schmitt, H., Shaviv, N., Tennekes, H., and Zichichi, A. 2012. No need to panic about global warming. Wall Street Journal, 27 January 2012. Available at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577171531838421366.html (accessed 5 June 2013).
4. Anderegg, W.R., Prall, J.W., Harold, J., and Schneider, S.H. 2010. Expert credibility in climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(27):12107-12109.
5. Bedford, D. 2010. Agnotology as a teaching tool: Learning climate science by studying misinformation. Journal of Geography, 109(4):159-165.
6. Berland, L.K., and Reiser, B.J. 2008. Making sense of argumentation and explanation. Science Education, 93(1):26-55.
7. Braman, D., Kahan, D.M., Slovic, P., Gastil, J., and Cohen, G.L. 2007. The second national risk and culture study: Making sense of—and making progress in—The American culture war of fact. GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works. Paper 211.
8. Chater, N., and Vitanyi, P. 2003. Simplicity: A unifying principle in cognitive science. Trends in Cognitive Science, 7:19-22.
9. Cook, J. 2014. Three perfect grade debunkings of climate misinformation. Skeptical Science. Available at http://skepticalscience.com/Three-perfect-grade-debunkingsclimate-misinformation.html (accessed 20 January 2014).
10. Cook, J., and Lewandowsky, S. 2011. The Debunking Handbook. St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland. Available at http://sks.to/debunk
11. Cook, J., Nuccitelli, D., Green, S.A., Richardson, M., Winkler, B., Painting, R., Way, R., Jacobs, P., and Skuce, A. 2013. Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature. Environmental Research Letters, 8(2):024024.
12. Cresser, M.S., Batty, L.C., Boxall, A., and Adams, C. 2012. Introduction to environmental science: Earth and man. London: Pearson.
13. Crichton, M. 2004. State of Fear. New York: Avon Books, HarperCollins.
14. Diethelm, P., and McKee, M. 2009. Denialism: What is it and how should scientists respond? The European Journal of Public Health, 19(1):2-4.
15. Ding, D., Maibach, E.W., Zhao, X., Roser-Renouf, C., and Leiserowitz, A. 2011. Support for climate policy and societal action are linked to perceptions about scientific agreement. Nature Climate Change, 1(9):462-466.
16. Doran, P.T., and Zimmerman, M.K. 2009. Examining the scientific consensus on climate change. Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union, 90(3):22-22.
17. Dunlap, R., and McCright, A. 2008. A widening gap: Republican and Democratic views on climate change. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 50(5):26-35.
18. Ecker, U.K.H., Lewandowsky, S., and Tang, D.T.W. 2010. Explicit warnings reduce but do not eliminate the continued influence of misinformation. Memory & Cognition, 38:1087-1100.
19. Elsasser, S.W., and Dunlap, R.E. 2012. Leading voices in the denier choir: Conservative columnists’ dismissal of global warming and denigration of climate science. American Behavioral Scientist, 57(6):754-776.
20. Guzzetti, B.J., Williams, W.O., Skeels, S.A., and Wu, S.M. 1997. Influence of text structure on learning counterintuitive physics concepts. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 34(7):701-719.
21. Hamilton, L.C. 2011. Education, politics, and opinions about climate change evidence for interaction effects. Climatic Change, 104(2):231-242.
22. Hamilton, L.C. 2012. Did the Arctic ice recover? Demographics of true and false climate facts. Weather, Climate, and Society, 4(4):236-249.
23. Hannam, P. Obama gives Aussie researcher 31,541,507 reasons to celebrate. Sydney Morning Herald, 17 May 2013. Available at http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/obama-gives-aussie-researcher-31541507-reasons-to-celebrate20130517-2jqrh.html (accessed 3 June 2013).
24. Heath, D., and Heath, C. 2007. Made to stick: Why some ideas survive and others die. New York, NY: Random House.
25. Heath, Y., and Gifford, R. 2006. Free-market ideology and environmental degradation the case of belief in global climate change. Environment and Behavior, 38(1):48-71.
26. Hoggan, J., and Littlemore, R. 2009. Climate cover-up. Vancouver, BC, Canada: Greystone Books.
27. Holland, G.J., and Webster, P.J. In press. Heightened tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic: Natural variability or climate trend? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences. Available at http://www2.mmm.ucar.edu/people/holland/files/hw2007final.pdf (accessed 1 May 2014).
28. Johnson, H.M., and Seifert, C.M. 1994. Sources of the continued influence effect: When misinformation in memory affects later inferences. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 20:1420-1436.
29. Kahan, D., Jenkins-Smith, H., Tarantola, T., Silva, C., and Braman, D. 2012. Geoengineering and the science communication environment: A cross-cultural experiment. The Cultural Cognition Project Working Paper, No. 92.
30. Kahan, D.M., Peters, E., Wittlin, M., Slovic, P., Ouellette, L.L., Braman, D., and Mandel, G. 2012. The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks. Nature Climate Change, 2(10):732-735.
31. Kendeou, P., and van den Broek, P. 2007. The effects of prior knowledge and text structure on comprehension processes during reading of scientific texts. Memory & Cognition, 35(7):1567-1577.
32. Kennedy, R.F., Jr. 2006. Was the 2004 election stolen? Rolling Stone, 15 June 2006.
33. Kowalski, P., and Taylor, A.K. 2009. The effect of refuting misconceptions in the introductory psychology class. Teaching of Psychology, 36:153-159.
34. Kuhn, D., and Crowell, A. 2011. Dialogic argumentation as a vehicle for developing young adolescents’ thinking. Psychological Science, 22(4):545-552.
35. Leiserowitz, A. 2006. Climate change risk perception and policy preferences: The role of affect, imagery, and values. Climatic Change, 77(1-2):45-72.
36. Leiserowitz, A., Maibach, E., Roser-Renouf, C., Feinberg, G., and Howe, P. 2012. Climate change in the American mind: Americans’ global warming beliefs and attitudes in September, 2012. Yale University and George Mason University. New Haven, CT: Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. Available at http://environment.yale.edu/climate/files/Climate-Beliefs-September-2012.pdf (accessed 14 May 2013).
37. Lewandowsky, S., Gignac, G.E., and Vaughan, S. 2012. The pivotal role of perceived scientific consensus in acceptance of science. Nature Climate Change, 3:399-404.
38. Loewenstein, G. 1994. The psychology of curiosity: A review and reinterpretation. Psychological Bulletin, 116:75-98.
39. Lomborg, B. 2007. Cool it! The skeptical environmentalists’ guide to global warming. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
40. Lombrozo, T. 2007. Simplicity and probability in causal explanation. Cognitive Psychology, 55:232-257.
41. Mandia, S.A. 2012. A model for teaching a climate change elective science course at the community college level. Paper presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, San Francisco, CA. December 3-7, 2012.
42. Mandia, S.A. 2013. Rubric for research paper evaluation. Available at http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/met295/rubric_paper.pdf (accessed 6 June 2013).
43. Manjoo, F. 2008. True enough: Learning to live in a post-fact society. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
44. Manson, L., Gava, M., and Boldrin, A. 2008. On warm conceptual change: The interplay of text, epistemological beliefs and topic interest. Journal of Educational Psychology, 100:291-309.
45. McCaffrey, M., Berbeco, M., and Scott, E. 2013. Toward a climate and energy literate society: Recommendations from the Climate & Energy Literacy Summit, December 7-9, 2012, Berkeley, California. National Center for Science Education. Available at http://ncse.com/files/pub/evolution/NCSE%20Climate%20and%20Energy%20Literacy%20Summit%20Report.pdf (accessed 2 October 2013).
46. McCright, A.M., and Dunlap, R.E. 2000. Challenging global warming as a social problem: An analysis of the conservative movement’s counter-claims. Social Problems, 47:499-522.
47. McCright, A.M., and Dunlap, R.E. 2011. Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States. Global Environmental Change, 21(4):1163-1172.
48. McCright, A.M., Dunlap, R.E., and Xiao, C. 2013. Perceived scientific agreement and support for government action on climate change in the USA. Climatic Change, 119(2):511-518.
49. McCrudden, M.T., and Kendeou, P. 2014. Exploring the link between cognitive processes and learning from refutational text. Journal of Research in Reading, 37(S1):S116-S140.
50. Muller, D.A., Bewes, J., Sharma, M.D., and Reimann, P. 2008. Saying the wrong thing: Improving learning with multimedia by including misconceptions. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 24(2):144-155.
51. National Center for Education Statistics. (n.d.) Quickstats. Available at http://nces.ed.gov/datalab/quickstats/default.aspx (accessed 12 June 2013).
52. Nisbet, M.C., and Myers, T. 2007. The polls—Trends twenty years of public opinion about global warming. Public Opinion Quarterly, 71(3):444-470.
53. Nordhaus, W.D. 2012. Why the global warming skeptics are wrong. The New York Review of Books, 59(5):32-34.
54. Nuccitelli, D. 2013. 97% global warming consensus meets resistance from scientific denialism. The Guardian. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2013/may/28/global-warmingconsensus-climate-denialism-characteristics (accessed 3 June 2013).
55. Obama, B. (13 May 2013) Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous. Read more: http://OFA.BO/gJsdFp [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/335089477296988160
56. Oreskes, N. 2004. The scientific consensus on climate change. Science, 3606(5702):1686-1686.
57. Oreskes, N. 2007. The scientific consensus on climate change: How do we know we’re not wrong? Climate change: What it means for us, our children, and our grandchildren. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
58. Oreskes, N. 2010. My facts are better than your facts: Spreading good news about global warming. In Morgan, M.S., and Howlett, P., eds., How do facts travel? Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, p. 135-166.
59. Oreskes, N., and Conway, E.M. 2010. Merchants of doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing USA.
60. Osborne, J. 2010. Arguing to learn in science: The role of collaborative, critical discourse. Science, 328(5977):463-466.
61. Pearlman, J. 2013. Scientific ‘‘consensus’’ that humans to blame for climate change. The Telegraph, 16 May 2013. Available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/10061285/Scientific-consensus-that-humans-to-blame-forclimate-change.html (accessed 3 June 2013).
62. Pew Research Center for the People and the Press (Pew). 2012. More say there is solid evidence of global warming. Available at http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/10-15-12%20Global%20Warming%20Release.pdf (accessed 14 May 2013).
63. Pipkin, B.W., Trent, D.D., Hazlett, R., and Bierman, P. 2014. Geology and the environment. Stamford, CT: Cengage.
64. Posner, G.J., Strike, K.A., Hewson, P.W., and Gertzog, W.A. 1982. Accommodation of a scientific conception: Towards a theory of conceptual change. Science Education, 66:211-227.
65. Prince, M. 2004. Does active learning work? A review of the research. Journal of Engineering Education, 93(3):223-231.
66. Proctor, R.N. 2008. Agnotology: A missing term to describe the cultural production of ignorance (and its study). In Proctor, R.N., and Schiebinger, L., eds., Agnotology: The making and unmaking of ignorance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, p. 1-33.
67. Schwarz, N., Sanna, L.J., Skurnik, I., and Yoon, C. 2007. Metacognitive experiences and the intricacies of setting people straight: Implications for debiasing and public information campaigns. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 39:127-161.
68. Seifert, C.M. 2002. The continued influence of misinformation in memory: What makes a correction effective? The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 41:265-292.
69. SkepticalScience.com. n.d. Global warming and climate change myths. Available at http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php (accessed 12 June 2013).
70. Skurnik, I., Yoon, C., Park, D.C., and Schwarz, N. 2005. How warnings about false claims become recommendations. Journal of Consumer Research, 31:713-724.
71. Suffolk County Community College. 2010. Title III Application: Strengthening Institutions Program, Title III, Part A of The Higher Education Act of 1965, CFDA # 84.031a, PR/Award # P031A100077.
72. Tippett, C.D. 2010. Refutation text in science education: A review of two decades of research. International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, 8(6):951-970.
73. van den Broek, P., and Kendeou, P. 2008. Cognitive processes in comprehension of science texts: The role of co-activation in confronting misconceptions. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 22:335-351.
74. Weber, E.U., and Stern, P.C. 2011. Public understanding of climate change in the United States. American Psychologist, 66(4):315-328.