How youth use scientific argumentation in civic participation on climate change: polar bears, the Great Barrier Reef, and ‘your job as president’

ABSTRACT Civic engagement that leverages scientific concepts and reasoning is cited as a goal of science education, yet little research has attended to authentic enactments of science-related civic engagement that youth undertake currently. We shed light on this understudied area by investigating youth letters written to the (then unknown) future US president in 2016. Using qualitative text analysis, we examined youth scientific reasoning via argumentation about climate change, aiming to clarify how youth use science in conjunction with other forms of reasoning within civic engagement, specifically around two popular icons of climate change—polar bears and the Great Barrier Reef. We describe several observed trends including a high frequency of logical appeals and their co-occurrence with implicit ethical appeals. We use these findings to offer implications for science education research and practice, suggesting explicit attention to the role of morals, ethics, and politics in science-related civic engagement.