PCLM-D-23-00229

A scoping review on climate change education

PLOS Climate

Dear Dr. Muccione,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS Climate. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Two reviewers have evaluated your submission and have identified a number of opportunities to significantly improve the manuscript. Please respond carefully to all of their suggestions when preparing your revisions.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Aug 17 2024 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at climate@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pclm/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Jamie Males

Executive Editor

PLOS Climate

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Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Partly

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: N/A

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Climate does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The paper is good.

However, abstract is too long.

Based on the findings and conclusions, the authors should spell-out some future directions of research.

The authors need to spell-out the significance and major contributions of the in the INTRODUCTION section.

Methodology is explained well.

The authors need to explain in detail what are major findings what they imply.

A comprehensive discussion on the results is warranted.

Reviewer #2: This is a well written paper that uses machine learning to review over 6000 papers and books that mention the words climate and education (and their equivalents). My concern is that that methods you report on don’t help me understand how you can draw your conclusions based on these data. Given the work that I’ve done with climate change education, you probably captured a fair number of papers that are not reporting research on climate change education. Rather, they might be discussing policy, or reporting on some narrow researchable science education question and then using that to say something about climate change. Does this possibility affect your findings? Are you assuming that these papers are focusing on climate education?

As I review these comments I feel like I'm saying the same thing multiple times. I apologize for the redundancy, and for my confusion. Perhaps you can use these comments to revise with clarity for readers like me.

Page 1 Abstract -- 1) Not so sure that the role education plays in advancing awareness, action, and advocacy is poorly understood – it just isn’t allowed to happen! We have a century of good research on science education. Wouldn’t that shed some light on this topic? 2) This might be the first document report exactly these things, but there have been many reviews of the literature to better understand what we know to date about climate education. 3) Some topics are “far” from others… can you interpret the map and put that in normal words? What does distance mean?

Page 3 -- Good introduction – but not sure that you’ve made the case for needing the kind of review you are providing. What good are topic associations, spatial distribution, etc.? What can we learn that we need to know? Where does the literature say we need this info?

If you are only using English language publications, is it a finding that most of the work has been done in English speaking countries? Seems like we don’t need a machine to tell us this! Education work is not well funded. People tend to research what is in their backyard!

Line 67 – I’m not sure what you mean by a limited synthesis on the extent to which education and climate change are interrelated topics. Isn’t the fact that people publish in climate change education evidence of a relationship?

Starting with Line 130 – As I don’t know what a Scikit-Learn pipeline is, I don’t know what this paragraph says. What is the goal of this step? And in the next paragraph, what are you predicting?

Line 253-264 - Word clouds seem to be a weak strategy for analysis. The sentence that contains the word could be saying climate education does not belong in schools and students should stay at their desk, not advocate for change. So the mention of a word doesn’t suggest what is being said. You don’t say that it does, but it just seems to hold minimal value. And the words come only from the abstracts? I lost that tidbit somewhere, though Line 269 says that, I think.

Do the topic clusters come from the monogram and bigram words, or from the abstracts in general? The word “health”, for example, could mean climate health or ecosystem health or human health. How did you get to a topic of medical health?

Line 330 – if most of the papers come from US, UK and Australia, how can Asia have the highest proportion of studies? I’m not understanding something.

Line 346 - Please help me understand what part of your data enables you to say “There is a clear urgent need for educators and governments to strongly support the immediate integration of climate change in curricula at all levels…” If this does not arise from your data, perhaps it does not belong in the Discussion. I think you are restating your premise, but I think it would work better in your conclusion.

Line 366 – for readers to agree with your assessment of what is interesting, or novel, or normal about the data, we would need to know what a typical range is from other comparable analyses. What sorts of word clouds are typically generated? Or are you just saying that the words that were generated were very diverse. I suspect that were you to use papers from 1990 to 2010 you would have more natural science/earth science words. That was how climate education was taught. But the tide has turned, and you have captured the new essence of climate education.

Line 373 – The clusters are not numbered in your figures, so it is not easy to follow your thinking. Your comments about these topics seem difficult to trace to your data. I see there are two clusters for child/young, one separate and one mixed with others. It seems it is possible that some research is focused on youth – their knowledge, their experiences, etc. – while in the other cluster papers might be focused on curriculum or professional development, with youth being one of the audiences. It is hard to see the youth movement in this figure.

Line 376 – spelling error on characterize

Lines 389 to 395 – Papers about climate disasters, weather displacement, vector-borne disease, etc. are not papers about climate education. They are probably just saying education is needed to help people address these problems. If so, are they relevant to your study?

All of these concerns I have about understanding the data make it challenging for me to believe “this analysis perhaps motivates a paradigm shift in the way we might implement climate education.” (line 410). How do you know what is being implemented? Even reading these papers will not tell you that, unless they are program evaluations. Published research rarely helps us understand practice, since the research question takes a very specific viewpoint – looking at how students overcome a misconception, or the use of humor, or the value of a homework assignment. They don’t explain the course syllabus or the how instructors build skills for affecting change.

Line 418 – Figure ??

Line 435 - I would say that very little funding in the US from NSF goes to climate education. Since your dataset has captured this confirms my hunch that these papers are about something else, and just mention the importance of education. But if I had a better understanding of how the search process culled papers, I might agree with you.

Lines 439-445 – I’m trying to follow this thinking. What needs to change? Do you think the heavy-duty climate science journals need to publish about education? Why isn’t it sufficient that Sustainability and Environmental Education Research publish about climate education? Do policy makers and researchers read journals from cover to cover, or do people use Google Scholar to find a paper that intrigues them? Would it help their career if a climate education researcher published in a climate science journal? Their peers and colleagues publish in education journals.

Line 478 – I wonder if the papers are on climate education research, or if they are reporting research findings on some aspect of climate education. I suspect many of those authors work or study at universities, making the classes they teach and the students they serve easy targets for a research study. Climate education is also a K-12 endeavor, which makes teachers and young people appropriate participants in a study. The conclusions you draw seem to be a matter of opportunity and logistics, more than paradigm or purpose.

I am having trouble seeing how these findings will help us incorporate climate education into mitigation and adaptation strategies. If you think they do, you need to be more specific! But I agree most city, state, and national climate action plans do not focus much on education, and they could do more. But I don't see your findings helping us determine what type of research is needed.

References – check number 65, I think rsquo doesn’t belong there!

best wishes.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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A scoping review on climate change education

PCLM-D-23-00229R1

Dear Dr. Muccione,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript 'A scoping review on climate change education' has been provisionally accepted for publication in PLOS Climate.

Before your manuscript can be formally accepted you will need to complete some formatting changes, which you will receive in a follow-up email from a member of our team. 

Please note that your manuscript will not be scheduled for publication until you have made the required changes, so a swift response is appreciated.

IMPORTANT: The editorial review process is now complete. PLOS will only permit corrections to spelling, formatting or significant scientific errors from this point onwards. Requests for major changes, or any which affect the scientific understanding of your work, will cause delays to the publication date of your manuscript.

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Thank you again for supporting Open Access publishing; we are looking forward to publishing your work in PLOS Climate.

Best regards,

Jamie Males

Staff Editor

PLOS Climate

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Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

Reviewer Comments (if any, and for reference):

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Climate does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #2: Yes

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #2: Many many thanks for your detailed explanations to my naive questions. I appreciate the additional work you did on this manuscript. I have learned a lot about systematic mapping!

I think your analysis is mostly in the past tense -- so perhaps "render' on line 378 should be rendered?

best wishes

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #2: No

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