Developing the Acceptance of Climate Change Scale for Undergraduate Students

该项目旨在为国家利益服务，为教育工作者提供一项新的调查，以揭示本科理科学生接受气候变化的许多方面。许多美国人，特别是本科生，接受全球气候变化正在发生;然而，目前文献中没有明确的气候变化接受定义。因此，这一“学生学习：一级”项目旨在解决学生接受气候变化的哪些方面以及哪些方面可能被当前的调查所掩盖的问题。科学领域的气候变化教育（例如，生物学、化学、地球科学）可以确定学生共同的替代概念，帮助学生将气候变化与他们的日常生活联系起来，并培养气候素养和知识。来自其他社会科学问题研究的证据（即，进化论教育）表明，理解和接受是以不可预测的方式联系在一起的。虽然现有的尺度来衡量气候变化的接受程度，本项目的目的是开发一个新的调查（即气候变化接受程度（ACC）），以捕捉其复杂性，是专门为本科理科学生。现有尺度的狭窄可能导致在捕捉气候变化接受程度的许多方面时不准确，并可能随后导致不可靠的数据，从而可能误导指示。该项目将开展一项新颖的调查，审查理科本科生接受气候变化的各个方面，目的是提高理科本科生气候变化教育的有效性。这项新调查的更广泛意义和重要性在于，它将导致关于在本科科学课程中包括哪些气候变化主题以解决接受问题的建议，它将代表一项新的调查，可供科学教育研究人员使用，以促进新的工作，询问有关学生气候变化接受的问题。总体而言，这项新调查的开发将支持NSF的使命，即培养一批具备STEM知识的公众，使其准备好支持科学进步并从中受益，并开发跨科学领域使用的共享指标。该项目的中心目标是开发一项新的调查，即气候变化接受度量表（ACC）。为了实现这一目标，该项目有三个子目标：（1）确定理科本科生对气候变化的接受程度;（2）遵循既定做法，制定气候变化接受程度量表（ACC）;（3）验证和试点ACC，并使用ACC通过定量研究衡量理科本科生对气候变化的接受程度。该项目的范围包括美国境内的本科理科学生（生物学、化学和地球科学）。制定气候变化协调委员会的第一步将是确定和汇编接受或拒绝气候变化的定义。第二，从第一步产生的知识将为ACC的开发提供信息。在ACC的初步实地测试之后，ACC将在生物，化学，在美国范围广泛的高等教育机构中使用气候和地球科学，以提高该工具的普遍性，并量化学生对气候变化及其相关因素的接受程度。验收ACC的五个阶段开发过程将遵循教育和心理测试的公认标准，包括项目创建，专家评审，有声思维访谈，项目修订和重新测试。此外，新调查的心理测量分析将依赖于这些标准来测试有效性（例如，内容、内部、并发和收敛有效性）和可靠性（例如，NSF IUSE：EDU计划支持研究和开发项目，以提高所有学生STEM教育的有效性。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project aims to serve the national interest by providing educators with a new survey to uncover the many aspects of climate change acceptance in undergraduate science students. Many Americans, and specifically undergraduate students, accept that global climate change is occurring; however, no clear definitions of climate change acceptance currently exist in the literature. Therefore, this Engaged Student Learning: Level 1 project intends to address the question of what aspects of climate change students are accepting and which aspects may be obscured by current surveys. Climate change education in science fields (e.g., biology, chemistry, geosciences) can identify common student alternative conceptions, help students link climate change to their everyday lives, and foster climate literacy and knowledge. Evidence from research on other socioscientific issues (i.e., evolution education) suggests that understanding and acceptance are tied together in unpredictable ways. Although current scales exist to measure climate change acceptance, this project aims to develop a new survey (i.e. Acceptance of Climate Change Scale (ACC)) to capture its complexity that is specifically designed for undergraduate science students. The narrowness of existing scales likely leads to inaccuracy in capturing the many aspects of climate change acceptance and may subsequently lead to unreliable data which may misinform instruction. This project will produce a novel survey that examines aspects of undergraduate science students' acceptance of climate change with the goal of increasing the effectiveness of climate change education for undergraduate science students. The broader significance and importance of this new survey is that it will lead to recommendations about which climate change topics to include in undergraduate science curricula to address acceptance, and it will represent a new survey that can be used by science education researchers to facilitate new work asking questions about students’ climate change acceptance. Overall, development of this new survey will support NSF’s mission of preparing a STEM-literate public that is ready to support and benefit from the advancement of science and develop shared metrics for use across science fields.The central goal of this project is to develop a new survey, the Acceptance of Climate Change Scale (ACC). To meet this goal, the project has three subgoals: (1) Define acceptance of climate change for undergraduate science populations; (2) Follow established practices to develop the Acceptance of Climate Change Scale (ACC); (3) Validate and pilot the ACC and use the ACC to measure science undergraduate students' acceptance of climate change through a quantitative study. The scope of the project includes undergraduate science student (biology, chemistry, and geoscience) populations within the US. The first steps in developing the ACC will be to identify and compile definitions of acceptance or rejection of climate change. Second, knowledge generated from the first steps will inform the development of the ACC. After initial field testing of the ACC, the ACC will be administered to students in science courses across the disciplines of biology, chemistry, and geosciences at a wide range of higher education institutions across the US to increase the generalizability of the tool and to quantify students’ acceptance of climate change and factors that relate to this acceptance. The five-stage development process of the ACC will follow accepted standards for educational and psychological testing, including item creation, expert review, think-aloud interviews, item revision, and retesting. Further, psychometric analysis of the new survey will rely on these standards for testing the validity (e.g., content, internal, concurrent, and convergent validity) and reliability (e.g., internal reliability of instrument, replication of testing nationally) of the ACC. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.