Building the right tools to understand what children are telling us
Kaitlyn Cisz, PRYDE Scholar
How do young children think and feel about climate change? Dr. Gary Evans, an environmental and developmental psychologist at Cornell University, is currently spearheading a project exploring children’s environmental attitudes towards climate change with the goal of building a new school curriculum for elementary students.
As a PRYDE Scholar, I have had the pleasure to develop this project alongside Dr. Evans’ team in the Global Climate Change (GCC) Lab for the past year with fellow PRYDE Scholar, Aliza Saunders. Building upon Dr. Evans’ previous research findings, our project explores the thoughts and feelings of children aged 6 and 7, a pivotal age in development in understanding and expanding environmental concepts and attitudes. Over the past year, I have worked in the GCC Lab building the project from the ground-up; drafting, piloting, and editing the study. However, new challengers arose as the study was conducted this summer. Although the study was finalized, recruiting a large diversity of participants over Zoom has been difficult and required a new skillset: building community partnerships. Luckily, our connections within 4-H across New York State, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), and even with local Pediatric offices have proven to be valuable in reaching a larger population of youth. These community partnerships took time to build, and have required us to take an active role in recruiting participants with the help of the contacts among the PRYDE community, our grant with EDF, and our team’s own social connections. We still have a long way to go with completing the study and designing the curriculum, but we hope to be able to develop a program that can benefit the community stakeholders who played a crucial role in making the research possible.
After building the study script from the ground-up, and now running the study as a researcher, I have learned the importance of probing children. Building the right tools to understand what children can tell us about a concept is a unique challenge of doing youth research. For instance, some children aged 6 and 7 may understand a concept, but may lack the vocabulary to express their understanding, and it is up to you as a researcher to ask the correct questions, which unfortunately cannot be scripted. However, the impromptu questions have produced some interesting responses which will assist us in the refinement of our curriculum development. For example, throughout the summer our team has noticed that young children often do not understand the term “environmental problem”, but when probed with questions such as “do you know any issues that you may see in nature?’, children are better able to comprehend the original question.
Although the Covid-19 pandemic prompted us to exercise a less traditional summer research project, I was fortunate enough to continue the work with Dr. Evans while living in Iceland for much of the summer. I conducted additional research on marine science at the University of Reykjavik as well, and was so grateful for the opportunity of a lifetime to be able to study environmental science in two separate contexts; I owe it all to PRYDE!
