TEACHING TECHNIQUES IN CLIMATE SCIENCE TELEVISION PROGRAMMING: EVALUATING THE QUALITY OF LEARNING OUTCOMES IN "EDUTAINMENT"

Civic scientific literacy (CSL), is defined as the ability of a citizen to find, make sense of, and use information about science or technology to engage in a public discussion of policy choices involving science or technology. A recent Pew Research Center study found that the percent of American adults who believe that the Earth is getting warmer mostly because of human activity has remained roughly constant, moving only slightly from 50% in 2006 to 48% in 2016. Given the growing number of public policy issues that involve science or technology, including climate change, the slight decline in the percentage of Americans who accept anthropogenic climate change despite increasing agreement among climate scientists is worrisome.

As most Americans lack any formal continuing science education beyond college, informal science communication through media and public science institutions such as museums, aquaria, and national parks may have a significant influence on CSL. As television programming is a means of continued informal science communication which requires minimal effort on the part of the learner, we developed a framework for evaluating the quality of learning outcomes associated with shows which focus on climate change education, such as the climate science episode of Bill Nye Saves the World. Our goals were to assess learning outcomes from such programming and also to evaluate whether more engaging modes of instruction, such as demonstrations or experiments, affected viewer self-perceptions about their level of engagement. Specifically, we assessed whether perceived engagement correlated with viewer pre-program and post-program ability to define key concepts related to climate and climate change. In order to assess learning outcomes students were asked to answer the same set of quantitative and qualitative questions related to climate science and impacts of climate change before and after viewing climate science programming. We found that students' self-perceptions about engagement did not always closely correlate with positive learning outcomes. We suggest improvements to the process of developing science television programming, which we believe should more rigorously incorporate evidence-based teaching methods to develop content scope and presentation.