It has been a wonderful experience to work as a summer intern for Cornell Cooperative Extension and connect my current research with real-life actions.
This summer, I worked intensively on a research project that looks into young US children’s understanding of and feelings about climate change. This is an ongoing project, and work this summer included coding child responses, improving the codebook, developing coding mechanisms for children’s emotions, and more.
More importantly, I also had the opportunity to analyze preliminary data to form a report on the common mistakes children make about climate change, as well as children’s common learning methodologies of climate change. This is because my field advisors are heavily engaged in environmental and outdoor education, and this part of our research project may provide some inspiration for their work. Also, they have provided us with some suggestions about the real-world application of this research.
Overall, I am very grateful for everyone in the project who provided this meaningful learning experience to me. Following up with this project, we look forward to communicating about how to extend this project in the future.