Exploring climate change conceptions and attitudes: Drawing implications for a framework on environmental literacy

This descriptive correlational study explored climate change conceptions and attitudes among 300 grade school children, 300 high school students, and 157 adult community members—parents, school administrators, teachers, local government officials living in three different communities (rural, urban, coastal) located in Luzon island, Philippines. Conceptions about climate change were based on the responses to a 21-item Concept Test on Climate Change and the perceived attitude towards climate change were culled from the responses to a 24-item Climate Change Attitude Inventory. Means and standard deviations were used to describe the participants’ conceptions and attitudes on climate change. Correlation analysis was utilized to determine relationships between climate change conceptions and their attitudes. Results showed that student participants hold rudimentary concepts about global warming and climate change and lack a deeper understanding of this environmental problem. ANOVA results revealed significant differences in conception scores of participants among the three community members and among the three community types. Thus, the context of the community must be considered as different community types entail different level of knowledge, dispositions, and competencies. From these results, implications were drawn in order to develop a framework for climate change literacy at the community level. © 2015 American Scientific Publishers