Anthropogenic climate change remains divisive in the United States, where skepticism of the scientific consensus is associated with conservative worldviews, resulting in political polarization. This study considers three hypotheses regarding U.S. polarization over climate change that have emerged from social psychology research and applies them to science education by showing how these hypotheses could relate to adolescents' science learning. We then test each hypothesis within an experimental educational intervention designed to study the influence of worldview, mechanistic knowledge, and quantitative reasoning on students' written arguments about climate change. We used mixed methods to analyze the results of this individually randomized trial with clustering involving 357 participants in grades 9–11 from 5 U.S. sites. Findings show that: (a) exposure to mechanistic knowledge about climate change increased odds of receptivity toward climate change; (b) increasingly conservative worldviews were associated with decreased odds of receptivity; (c) worldview and quantitative reasoning interacted, resulting in an amplified effect of worldview for students with greater quantitative reasoning. Results also suggest that the influence of worldview and mechanistic knowledge on receptivity work independently from one another in our dataset. This study demonstrates the value of teaching mechanistic understandings of climate change, yet also demonstrates the influence of worldview on receptivity to climate change for adolescents, as well as complex interactions between quantitative reasoning (something school science aims to develop) and worldview. It shows that moving the U.S. public toward the scientific consensus is complex and involves confronting ideologically motivated reasoning within science education.

中文翻译：

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机械知识，世界观和定量推理对气候变化话语的复杂影响：青年人出于思想动机的推理的证据

在美国，人为的气候变化仍然存在分歧，在美国，对科学共识的怀疑与保守的世界观有关，从而导致政治分化。这项研究考虑了来自社会心理学研究的关于美国对气候变化两极分化的三个假设，并通过展示这些假设如何与青少年的科学学习联系起来，将其应用于科学教育。然后，我们在旨在研究世界观，机械知识和定量推理对学生有关气候变化的书面论据的影响的实验性教育干预措施中检验每种假设。我们使用混合方法来分析该个体随机试验的结果，该研究采用聚类法，涉及来自5个美国站点的9-11年级的357名参与者。研究结果表明：（a）接触有关气候变化的机械知识会增加人们接受气候变化的可能性；（b）日益保守的世界观与接受可能性降低有关；（c）世界观和定量推理相互影响，导致世界观对具有更大定量推理能力的学生产生放大作用。结果还表明，在我们的数据集中，世界观和机械知识对接受能力的影响相互独立。这项研究证明了对气候变化进行机械理解的价值，同时也证明了世界观对青少年对气候变化的接受能力的影响，以及定量推理（学校科学旨在发展的东西）与世界观之间复杂的相互作用。它显示了移动U。