How should science museums communicate climate science? (lecture summary & slides) - Cultural Cognition of Health

I had the great privilege of participating in a conference, held at the amazing Museum of Science in Boston, on how museums can engage the public in climate science.  Below are my remarks–as best as I can remember them a week later.  Slides here.

You are experts on the design of science-museum exhibits.

I am not. Like Dietram, I study the science of science communication with empirical methods.

I share his view that there are things he and I and others have learned that are of great importance for the design of science museum exhibits on climate change.

If you ask me, though, I won’t be able to tell you what to do based on our work—because I am not an expert at designing museum exhibits.

So if in fact I am right to surmise that insights gleaned from the scientific study of science communication are relevant to design of climate science exhibits, you should be able to tell me what the implications of this work are for your craft.

I will thus share with you everything I know about climate science communication.

I’ve reduced it all to one sentence (albeit one with a semi-colon):

What ordinary members of the public “believe” about climate change doesn’t reflect what they know; it expresses who they are.

The research on which this conclusion rests actually originates in the study of public opinion on evolution.

One thing such research shows is that there is in fact no correlation whatsoever between what people say they believe about evolution and what they know about it.  Those who say they “believe” in evolution are no more or less likely to understand the elements of the modern synthesis—random mutation, genetic variance, and natural selection—than those who say they “don’t.”

Indeed, neither is likely to be able to give a sufficiently cogent account of these concepts to pass a high school biology test.

Another thing scholars have learned from studying public opinion on evolution is that what one “believes” about it has no relationship to how much one knows about science generally.

I’ll show you some evidence on that.  It consists in the results of a science literacy test that I administered to a large nationally representative sample.

Like a good knowledge assessment should, this science comprehension instrument consisted of a set of questions that varied in difficulty.

Some, like “Electrons are smaller than atoms—true or false” were relatively easy: even an individual whose score placed him or her at the mean comprehension level, would have had about a 70% chance of getting that one right.

Other questions were harder: “Which gas makes up most of the Earth’s atmosphere? Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Carbon Dioxide, Oxygen?”  Someone of mean science comprehension would have only about a 25% chance of getting that one.

If one looks at the item-response profile for “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals—true or false?,” an item from the NSF’s Science Indicators battery, we see that it’s difficult to characterize it as either hard or difficult.  At the mean level of science comprehension, there is about a 55% chance that someone with an average level of science comprehension will get this one correct. But the probability of getting it right isn’t much different from that for respondents whose science comprehension levels are significantly lower or significantly higher than average.

The reason is that the NSF Indicator Evolution item isn’t a valid measure of science comprehension for a general-population sample of test takers.

Its item-response profile looks sort of like what one might expect of a valid measure when we examine the answers of those members of the population who are below average in religiosity (as measured by frequency of prayer, frequency of church attendance, and self-reported importance of religion): that is, the likelihood of getting it right slopes upward as science comprehension goes up.