Our Work
Current Projects
Here's a small sampling of some of the driving questions and ideas the SPiEE lab has been investigating lately.
Common Ground in Environmental Dialogue
From Conflict to Connection
Increased polarization in the U.S. is an acute problem, especially when it comes to environmental issues. We combine literature recognizing common ground as a promising negotiation technique with the desire to lessen tensions that arise during difficult conversations – does establishing common ground and acknowledging merits within the other party’s position result in better relational outcomes?
We are in the process of putting common ground to the test with a variety of topics (from environmental trade-offs for a fictitious town to gathering opinions on mandatory climate change curriculum in schools) across a variety of mediums (presenting information through an imaginary town hall to social media posts), hoping to result in implications that reach across the divides. Per our preliminary data, this seems like the case, with increases in positive relational outcomes, such as perceived fairness and similarities!
Exploring Outdoor Education
Education outside the four walls of a traditional classroom can serve as impactful experiences for young people. Partnering with formal and non-formal educational organizations around Maryland, we explore the implications of and barriers to education outdoors. Using a variety of methods, including experimental designs and qualitative interviews, we investigate the relational, attitudinal, and behavioral student outcomes, as well as teachers’ perceptions and experience, of outdoor education. Past projects include programmatic evaluation for a retreat center providing residential outdoor experiences for students. Currently, we are working with teachers in Baltimore City to understand their perspective on school-based outdoor experiences.
Perspective-Taking Asymmetry
Through our work examining social perspective-taking, we uncovered interesting patterns in the way people describe their own efforts in taking others’ perspectives versus how they perceive the effort others put into taking their perspective. Namely, we tend to believe that we work harder at understanding other peoples’ opinions, motivations, and feelings than they do towards us. Our team is curious about the implications of this perceived asymmetry. We’re exploring this idea from several angles to uncover possible explanations for why and under what conditions this gap appears and how this asymmetry plays out across different relationships. For example, do teachers perceive wider gaps in perspective-taking effort between themselves and their school leadership? Their students? Students’ families? How does the perception that others are trying more or less hard to understand our perspective impact well-being, job satisfaction, and feelings of social support? Currently, we are designing survey measures to test these and a range of related questions.
Examining Opinions on Climate Change Education
A few states have adopted curricular standards that require climate change education in K-12 schools and more are considering similar legislation, bringing climate science to the center of an already contentious public debate over what gets taught in schools. In this context, it is important to understand the arguments levied by those who oppose teaching about anthropogenic climate change and how they relate to more general climate science skepticism and denial. Through thematic analysis, our team is analyzing reasons people give for their position against mandating climate change education in K-12 schools. Our mixed-methods approach explores possible connections to participants’ broader understandings about climate change and the nature of science itself.
Past Projects & Grants
National Geographic Grant
2019 - 2022
When a picture is combined with 1000 words
Recently, the United Nations has urged greater use of storytelling—a particularly successful approach in affecting people’s beliefs in other domains—to help listening audiences better resonate with the issue of climate change. We propose testing a potentially even more powerful intervention to shift the mindsets of the storytellers themselves. Specifically, we propose to leverage different approaches to storytelling to enhance students’ commitment to what is arguably the most pressing issue facing youth around the world—global climate change. The goal of this project is to ascertain which of a promising array of storytelling approaches (personal, visual, or combined) is most effective in shifting participants’ attitudes and behaviors towards biodiversity and environmental sustainability. Furthermore, with a relatively large dataset, we should be able to explore whether the effects of the intervention differ for diverse sub-populations of students (e.g., first-generation college students or science/technology/engineering/math oriented students). Thus, our objectives are to learn which storytelling approach is most effective for which outcomes (shifting students’ attitudes or shifting students’ behaviors) and for which students.
Spencer Foundation Mid-Career Award
The right environment for a new approach: Adding content to social interventions in environmental education
Dr. Gehlbach was honored to receive a Spencer Mid-Career fellowship to pivot a portion of his research towards environmental education and issues of sustainability. Below is a synopsis of his proposed year of study.
Recent educational interventions have successfully altered students’ perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors through social means or have bolstered students’ content knowledge with new curricular approaches. Few interventions do both. Yet, to tackle society’s most daunting problems such as environmental sustainability, students simultaneously need deep content knowledge, resilient attitudes, and the ability to act on these problems. To develop students with these diverse capacities, educators need a new approach to educational interventions. This proposal centers on “content-driven social interventions” which create synergies between the disparate goals of bolstering understanding, shaping perceptions, and inspiring behavior change within the same intervention. During the proposed course of study I hope to learn how to transform the social psychological interventions that form the foundation of my past experiments into content-driven social interventions. Specifically, I seek to:
1. Develop knowledge of the core environmental practices and principles that secondary-school students need to know,
2. Learn storytelling techniques to develop case-based curricula which teach scientific content and principles in ways that maximize understanding and retention,
3. Acquire basic methodological competence in social network analysis to better document the effects of these new interventions, and
4. Conduct preliminary pilot experiments that test the efficacy of these interventions.
Laura and John Arnold Foundation Grant
2016 – 2018
Creating Birds of a Feather: Mitigating Inequality by Reducing the Achievement Gap
Project Description:
Educational disparities between students from different racial and cultural backgrounds cause differential employment opportunities, inequitable socio-economic outcomes, and wealth gaps, which in turn perpetuate differential educational opportunities for the next generation. The proposed randomized controlled trial will evaluate an intervention to help disrupt this pernicious cycle of inequality. By using the psychological principle of similarity to improve relationships between faculty and students, the intervention aims to improve academic achievement for undergraduates. The intervention is designed to help close the achievement gap between minority students and first-generation students relative to their peers who are White or from families whose parents went to college. Specifically, the intervention employs a get-to-know-you survey to help students and faculty members find areas of commonality around which they can bond. This study will investigate the efficacy of this intervention through a field experiment by randomly assigning instructor-student dyads to either find out about commonalities they share from the initial get-to-know-you survey or not. In the treatment dyads both instructors and students learn what they have in common; in the control dyads, the students receive placebo feedback (what they have in common with students on other campuses) while the instructors receive no feedback on this half of their students. The study will explore whether the intervention improves instructor-student relationships, as well as student academic performance and persistence in college.
Check out our latest publications covering these topics & more: