#484: From Data to Meaning: Cognitive Resources for Interpreting CO2 Time-Series Graphs

Investigating how individuals understand climate data is crucial for improving the instruction of climate change. The Knowledge in Pieces framework posits that individuals’ knowledge, including climate knowledge, is separated into pieces, which remain isolated or are connected in productive and unproductive ways. We investigated how an individual connects their knowledge about climate change to graphs representing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations over various timescales. Our ongoing analyses suggest that individuals connected more recent rises in CO2 to their cognitive resources about human induced climate change, in mostly productive ways.