Environmental literacy plays a limited role in students' assessment of carbon footprints

Dósa, K. ., & Russ, R. S. (2020). Making sense of carbon footprints: how carbon literacy and quantitative literacy affects information gathering and decision-making. Environmental Education Research, 26, 421-453.

Understanding carbon footprints is critical to addressing climate change. Carbon footprints are the measure of greenhouse gas emissions (measured in CO2e) that are directly and indirectly generated by certain human activities. Environmental literacy, defined as the awareness of environmental issues and knowing how to apply this awareness, is key in addressing environmental issues. The researchers examined two areas of environmental literacy, carbon literacy and quantitative literacy, and assessed how people use them to reason about carbon footprints. Carbon literacy is defined as understanding how human activities and subsequent carbon emissions impact climate change. Quantitative literacy is the ability to apply knowledge and understanding of numbers in real-world situations. This study sought to understand how prior knowledge and environmental literacy influence how people understand carbon footprints, specifically those reported in the news.

This study took place at a large university in the Midwest United States. The researchers recruited students using departmental emails and fliers and ultimately interviewed 52 undergraduate and graduate students. In the interviews, they posed three prompts regarding carbon footprints in the following scenarios:
Facebook's annual carbon footprint is estimated to be 400,000 metric tons of CO2e. What do you think about that?
The carbon footprint of an average dairy farm in the United States is about 2500 metric tons of CO2e in a year. What do you think about that?
The annual carbon footprint of the chocolate industry in the United States is roughly 1 million metric tons of CO2e. What do you think about that?

These prompts were chosen for their relevance to participants' everyday lives. Students had books and an iPad to reference any information they needed and the researchers asked follow-up questions if the students were hesitant to answer.

The researchers divided the interviews into three phases: the intuitive and prompt judgment phase, in which participants intuitively reacted to the prompt; the information-gathering phase, in which the participants expressed information they already knew and continued to gather information via iPads, books, or by asking questions; and the decision-making phase, in which the participant decided whether the carbon footprint was alarming. The researchers identified what type and how many strategies were used during the information-gathering phase and the decision-making phase. After the interview, participants completed a survey to measure their carbon and quantitative literacy. The researchers analyzed the interviews for themes and grouped the participants from their carbon and quantitative literacy identified from the survey.

The results suggested that participants' environmental literacy played a limited role in how they ultimately decided whether the footprints are concerning. Overall, the researchers found that the carbon and quantitative literacies were relevant only to the information-gathering phase. While participants explored multiple strategies of reasoning about the prompt in the information-gathering phase, only one strategy “won out” in the decision-making phase as to why they thought the prompt was concerning or not. This pattern of utilizing one strategy to inform the participants' final decision was found to be true with participants of differing carbon literacy and quantitative literacy.

The researchers found that in the information-gathering phase, the highly carbon or quantitative literate participants placed the problem in the prompt into a larger context, while those with lower carbon or quantitative literacy focused on the prompt only. For example, the high carbon literacy group explored concerns relating to the dairy industry, and whereas those with low carbon literacy did not. However, carbon or quantitative literacy did not influence type and how many strategies the participants used in the information-gathering phase.

Although there was a difference in the process of exploring the prompt among participants with differing levels of carbon and quantitative literacy in the information-gathering stage, the researchers found that ultimately the participants did not employ their literacies in the decision-making phase. For example, one participant used her carbon and quantitative literacies to determine that the carbon footprint of the dairy industry is much larger than Facebook's carbon footprint. However, she ultimately decided that Facebook's carbon footprint should be tackled first because she thought that emissions from dairy farming are unavoidable. The researchers identified numerous instances of these “shutdowns,” or unavoidable emissions, in which participants abandoned prompts because they saw no way to change the situation.

This study has limitations, including that that participants could have already had a preconceived bias toward one of the prompt subjects due to more media coverage of one over another. The researchers also noted that dairy farming is tied with family identity and the livelihoods of many participants at this midwestern institution. Students who were interested in the research area could have been more inclined to participate in the interviews and therefore introduced bias into the study. Finally, the results from this study were specific to these participants; a study conducted at another university may have different results.

The researchers recommend that educators identify shutdowns. Understanding why students believe that emissions are unavoidable in certain instances will allow educators to continue to engage students in environmental issues and encourage them to pursue change. The researchers emphasized that educators must see value in what students consider important, support them in understanding their choices, and consider diverse viewpoints.

The Bottom Line

<p>This study investigated whether students at a midwestern university used quantitative and/or environmental literacy when reasoning about carbon footprints. The researchers found that when participants ultimately had to decide whether the footprints were environmentally concerning, they did not rely on the two literacies. This suggests that that participants' prior knowledge about carbon footprints is disconnected from how they ultimately decide about whether the footprints are worrisome. The researchers recommend that rather than helping students be “better informed,” educators should focus on supporting students in what they value to be important and to develop a consciousness about their choices.</p>

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