


Everyday life is strongly shaped by social media communication, particularly for young people. Even if these services allow people to communicate in real time around the globe, in recent years problems such as echo chambers, filter bubbles, or fake news emerged. These phenomena also affect societal discourses about topics such as climate change, leading to digital spaces with open denial of scientific facts. Due to this development, there is a need for further knowledge about the role of social media for the climate change discourse.
An interdisciplinary perspective on science education



Usage, Literacies, and Interventions from the Perspective of Science Education
Within SoMeCliCS, we apply the perspective of science education to investigate (1) the usage, (2) required literacies, and (3) possibilities for interventions to foster these competencies. Therefore, we use (4) digital methods.
Research approach
-
What is social media?
Social media describes a variety of platforms, that allow to communicate with other people via internet-based services (Carr & Hayes, 2015). Within social media, different categories such as social networking sites (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) and social messenger (e.g., WhatsApp, Telegram) can be differentiated.
-
Why „from the perspective of science education“?
Social media is no new phenomenon, which is why many studies have already examined the role of social media. For example, big data analyses were able to investigate the effects of echo chambers (e.g., Williams et al., 2015). Nevertheless, these studies often exclude the psychological perspective of social media (Montag et al., 2016).
Science education (biology, chemistry, and physics education) are in a prominent position here, as they combine the respective content knowledge with relevant pedagogical and psychological processes. We understand the viewing and processing of subject-related content in social media as informal learning, which we investigate from a science educational point of view.
In addition to this connecting role of science didactics, researchers from the L3S support the project by developing modern computational techniques to grasp the large amounts of data.
-
Why for the topic of climate change?
Even if the possible effects of climate change have been known for many years, a sufficient approach of mitigation has not been started. While the science behind the topic is complex and therefore hard to understand, people also are confronted with motivated biases that can be fostered in social media due to phenomena such as echo chambers, filter bubbles, and fake news.
Given the urgency of the topic of climate change, we believe the topic is a perfect example for unravelling the effects of social media for scientific topics. The results may therefore also contribute to a wider understanding of social media in society and illustrate ways to prepare living in modern digital societies.
Research framework



-
Project overview
The overall project is defined by five different subprojects, which all include specific aims. First, we are interested in the usage (U) of social media for the topic of climate change. Based on this, the next package defines the required literacies (L) needed for acting competently in social media. Both packages inform possible interventions (I), describing ways to foster the literacies in formal learning contexts. All these projects are supported by the package of digital methods (DM), in which the L3S supports the research with methods from computer science.
Concerning the distribution of the project results, all projects contribute to the final package science communication (SC), which includes web visibility, own scientific conferences, and an edited volume.
Project structure
Timeline
The project started in July 2021 and will be completed in 2024. In the first year, the project was established and the first research packages were started. In March 2022, the kick-off meeting was held to further discuss the research strategies. In March 2023, another meeting was held. A variety of researchers working on social media in relation to climate education were guests. They will also contribute a part to the edited volume, which will be published in the last year of the project. The project ends with a final presentation.
-
Subprojects
As described in the project overview, we have overall four main research packages: Usage, literacies, interventions, and digital media. Each of these projects involves own research aims, described in further detail on this page.
Usage
As a first aim of our project is to define how people and particularly students use social media for the topic of climate change. Within this aim we investigate the general role of social media (U1) and possible connections (U2) with other variables. For the role of social media, we currently apply qualitative methods for investigating how people perceive social media content in social media. As a final objective, we will generalize the results to a larger audience (U3).
Literacies
The second major aim of the project is to define required literacies for the topic of climate change in social media. For this, we first conduct a systematic literature review (L1) about relevant existing literacies and then state the literacies (L2) for students. In the final package, possible influences on these literacies are investigated (L3).
Interventions
The aim of the third subproject is to investigate possibilities to foster the defined literacies in interventions. To be able to investigate effects of these interventions, we develop a measurement instrument (I1), which then will be applied in an inquiry oriented (I2) and training oriented (I3) intervention.
Digital methods
While the packages are focused on relevant subject specific research questions, the methods require certain skills in the face of digital methods. These includes using techniques such as machine learning or eye-tracking, to uncover the role of social media for science education in a larger set of data by allowing a high resolution of the learning processes.
Science communication
For all packages, we plan different activities to communicate our results. This includes web visibility (SC1), different scientific meetings (SC2), and an edited volume at the end of the project (SC3).
-
Collaborators
The project is a collaboration of the Institute for Science Education and the L3S Research Center at Leibniz University Hannover.
We also collaborate with colleagues from the Justus-Liebig-University Gießen. While the project leading is with the Institute of Science Education, we have different people working with the project. An overview of all involved people in alphabetical order and their roles can be found in the table.
Oleh Astappiev
L3SExpert for LearnWeb-platform
Dr. Alexander Büssing
Institute of Science EducationProject leader and leader subproject usage
Dr. Marco Fisicella
L3SExpert for Artificial intelligence
Prof. Dr. Gunnar Friege
Institute of Mathematics and Physics EducationLeader subproject interventions
Prof. Dr. Kerstin Kremer
Justus Liebig University GiessenLeader subproject usage
EN [Text: Kresin]
Soraya Kresin
Institute of Science EducationDoctoral student subproject usage
Dr. Stephanie Lenzer
Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education, Kiel
Subproject literacies
Dr. Ivana Marenzi
L3SProject leader subproject digital methods
Prof. Dr. Andreas Nehring
Institute of Science EducationLeader subproject literacies
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Nejdl
L3SProject leader subproject digital methods
Catharina Pfeiffer
Institute of Science EducationDoctoral student subproject literacies
Sophia Siegman
Institute of Mathematics and Physics EducationDoctoral student subproject interventions
Apoorva Upadhyaya
L3SDoctoral student subproject usage
Events
Symposium 2023



The symposium started on Thursday with the Keynote Lecture, where Prof. Dr. Sascha Schanze gave welcoming words at the beginning. This was followed by Dr. Alexander Büssing with an introductory talk on the SoMeCliCS project. The final presentation was contributed by Dr. Friederike Hendricks, who spoke in her keynote on the topic of trust in digital media. This was followed by a panel discussion in which people from the research community, as well as a teacher and a student from the Fridays for Future group, discussed the role of social media in digital science education. The panel was moderated by Dr. Nadja Belova(University of Bremen). The evening ended with a final reception.
The following day included presentations from all participants covering the broad range of research. In addition to the presentations from the SoMeCliCS projects, other topics like the detection of fake news, the role of Nature of Science as part of science media literacy, and literature reviews on inoculation theory or interventions to promote competence, were also presented.
Kick-Off-Symposium



The kick-off meeting of the SoMeCliCS project took place on the 10th and 11th of March 2022.
The kick-off meeting was spread over two days. The lecture evening took place on Thursday in the beautiful atmosphere of the royal stables and was streamed live on YouTube. First, Dr. Alexander Büssing gave an overview about the project under the title Perspectives on social media and Science Education: About SoMeClICS an overview of the research project. Afterwards Prof. Dr. Rogers (University of Amsterdam) talked about the communication of climate change using modern methods under the title Where is the urgency in the Climate Change Discourse. In the following discussion, these possibilities and the interdisciplinary character of the topic were emphasized.
On Friday morning, all those involved in the project had the opportunity to discuss the individual sub-projects online. In the afternoon, the focus was on the school practice of the project, with teachers presenting their perspectives and making exciting contributions. Prof. Dr. Höttecke (University of Hamburg) supported the teacher training with a lecture about climate education.