Speaker Series 4

“What is climate change and what can I do about it?” A survey and educational intervention with 10- to 13-year-olds

This talk explores how youth understand and engage in climate change. Many schools start teaching children about climate change by fourth grade, but we currently know little about how much youth understand by this age and how those beliefs relate to their own actions. In the present research, we surveyed a diverse sample of 10- to 13-year olds from local elementary and middle schools (N = 460), where youth were asked to report their understanding of climate change, their feelings of individual and collective efficacy, their attitudes toward climate action, and their own engagement in actions in the past month. Overall, we found that children knew very little about climate change and many of them associated climate change with individual consumption and waste (e.g.,“Climate change is when people don't put their trash in the can”). On average, children reported somewhat positive efficacy and attitudes toward climate action, but they engaged in very little action themselves. One encouraging finding was that students who felt efficacious about action were more likely to engage in action themselves. To follow up, we implemented an intervention with a subset of 130 of the same children, who learned about climate science in their class across several weeks and later retook the same survey. We found that students reported no higher efficacy or attitudes toward climate action in the post-survey after the intervention. At the end of the talk, we will discuss the implications of our findings for the psychology of climate action, education, and efforts to address the climate crisis.