Research and Creative Grant Competition 2013 Funded Projects Changing Ice, Changing Public: Evaluating Glacial Repeat Photography as an Education Tool

Evaluating and increasing the efficacy of climate change education is important because despite overwhelming evidence of climate change, the U.S. public remains skeptical and uninformed about the topic. Recently, climate change educators have been using Glacial Repeat Photography (GRP) to increase public awareness. During GRP a scientist photographer couples a past photograph (1930s) of a glacier with a recent picture that displays the glacier’s diminished stature. Climate change educators combine these paired photographs with environmental interpretation to increase public understanding of climate change. Although widely adopted, the efficacy of GRP as an educational approach has not been evaluated. This project will develop an evaluative process to identify the long-term impact and effective pedagogical processes used in GRP. The investigators will use a quasi-experimental design focusing on a quantitative questionnaire administered to GRP viewers (n = 2,000). Researchers will manipulate four elements of the GRP experience and viewers will be assigned to one of four treatment groups. Researchers will use multivariate approaches to identify the relationships between treatment, control, and dependent variables. Although these investigative techniques are not new, they have not been applied to the GRP experience, and thus represent a novel application. Since the GRP approach is informed and adopted by multiple disciplines (e.g., education, geology, communication studies), this project will influence how researchers and agencies conceptualize, facilitate, and evaluate the GRP viewing experience. The investigators specifically designed this project to use the developed methods and results to leverage extramural funding from the U.S. National Park Service.