密歇根新闻广播 老师们是怎么看待全球变暖的?对学生有什么影响?

The vast majority of climate scientists agree climate change is happening and it’s mainly caused by people.

A new study looks at how middle school students beliefs about climate change is shaped by their teachers’ own beliefs.

Kathryn Stevenson is the lead author and an assistant professor in the College of Natural Resources at North Carolina State University. She and her colleagues studied kids and teachers in North Carolina.

Ninety-two percent of the students had a teacher who believed climate change is happening.

"Having a teacher that believes in climate change was almost as impactful as what students know themselves," she says. "So having a teacher that believes climate is happening was influential¹ of students’ beliefs that climate change is both happening and human caused."

But she found just 12% of students had teachers who believe climate change is mainly caused by people.

"We found a very small percentage of students had teachers that actually think that climate change is predominately caused by humans even though 97% of climate scientists will tell you that’s the case," she says.

Stevenson says her study was inspired by a national survey of middle and high school science teachers published in the journal Science earlier this year, that found a lack of understanding of the science of climate change.

This NPR piece explains:

Roughly 3 in 4 say they talk about global warming in class, though typically only for an hour or two. But the study's lead author, Eric Plutzer of Penn State, says barely a majority are getting the science right.

"A little more than half are sending clear messages that human consumption of fossil fuels is the major cause of recent warming," Plutzer says.

What are the rest saying?

Well, roughly 30 percent tell students that humans are only partly to blame for climate change, along with natural causes. The problem with that, Plutzer says, is that it sends mixed messages, suggesting that the causes of climate change are still up for debate — when there is no debate among the vast majority of climate scientists.

"They found that teachers are essentially² as polarized as the general population of adults, and most of those beliefs are driven by ideology," says Stevenson. "We were wondering, oh, gosh, is that polarization just getting transferred to the next generation?"

So, Stevenson and her team surveyed kids and their teachers.

"Among adults what we’re finding over and over, is that people's perceptions of climate change really have very little to do with how much they understand the science. It has more to do with their political ideologies³ or what news sources they turn to," she says. "But with kids, it has less to do with these political ideologies and much more to do with their actual understanding of climate science. So yet again, in this study, we found that kids’ understanding of the actual science of climate change seems to be the most important factor with forming how they think about climate change."

As she writes in the study:

We found that teacher beliefs that global warming is happening and student climate change knowledge were the strongest predictors of student belief that global warming is happening and human caused. Conversely, teacher beliefs about human causes of global warming had no relationship with student beliefs, suggesting that science teachers’ low recognition of the causes of global warming is not necessarily problematic in terms of student outcomes. These findings may be explained by previous research suggesting adolescents interpret scientific information relatively⁴ independently of ideological⁵ constraints⁶. Though teacher polarization may be problematic in its own right, it appears that as long as climate change information is presented in classrooms, students deduce anthropogenic causes.

1 influential   

adj.有影响的，有权势的

参考例句：

• He always tries to get in with the most influential people.他总是试图巴结最有影响的人物。
• He is a very influential man in the government.他在政府中是个很有影响的人物。

2 essentially   

adv.本质上，实质上，基本上

参考例句：

• Really great men are essentially modest.真正的伟人大都很谦虚。
• She is an essentially selfish person.她本质上是个自私自利的人。

3 ideologies   

n.思想（体系）( ideology的名词复数 )；思想意识；意识形态；观念形态

参考例句：

• There is no fundamental diversity between the two ideologies. 这两种思想意识之间并没有根本的分歧。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Radical ideologies require to contrast to their own goodness the wickedness of some other system. 凡是过激的意识形态，都需要有另外一个丑恶的制度作对比，才能衬托出自己的善良。 来自辞典例句

4 relatively   

adv.比较...地，相对地

参考例句：

• The rabbit is a relatively recent introduction in Australia.兔子是相对较新引入澳大利亚的物种。
• The operation was relatively painless.手术相对来说不痛。

5 ideological   

a.意识形态的

参考例句：

• He always tries to link his study with his ideological problems. 他总是把学习和自己的思想问题联系起来。
• He helped me enormously with advice on how to do ideological work. 他告诉我怎样做思想工作，对我有很大帮助。

6 constraints   

强制( constraint的名词复数 )； 限制； 约束

参考例句：

• Data and constraints can easily be changed to test theories. 信息库中的数据和限制条件可以轻易地改变以检验假设。 来自英汉非文学 - 科学史
• What are the constraints that each of these imply for any design? 这每种产品的要求和约束对于设计意味着什么？ 来自About Face 3交互设计精髓