The science is clear: Earth’s average temperature has increased over the past 100 years at an unprecedented rate and human activities that emit greenhouse gases are the main cause. However, what we should do to address climate change is a socioscientific issue that cannot be answered by scientific information alone. When educators engage students in learning about socioscientific issues they must attend to student reasoning in all three domains: ideological, content knowledge, and the nature of science. This is a very challenging knot to untangle! Students have difficulty expressing their own ideas and often have little understanding of where those ideas come from. At the same time, they may hold misconceptions about the content and/or the nature of science, and they may hold ideological positions that differ from their peers or the teacher. This diagram shows how misconceptions about climate science and the nature of science can interact with ideological perspectives that conflict with the scientific consensus around climate change.
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