ASU Scholarship Showcase

Does school participatory budgeting (SPB) increase students’ political efficacy? SPB, which is implemented in thousands of schools around the world, is a democratic process of deliberation and decision-making in which students determine how to spend a portion of the school’s budget. We examined the impact of SPB on political efficacy in one middle school in Arizona. Our participants’ (n = 28) responses on survey items designed to measure self-perceived growth in political efficacy indicated a large effect size (Cohen’s d = 1.46), suggesting that SPB is an effective approach to civic pedagogy, with promising prospects for developing students’ political efficacy.

Much of the richness of human thought is supported by people’s intuitive theories—mental frameworks capturing the perceived structure of the world. But intuitive theories can sometimes contain and reinforce misconceptions, such as misconceptions about vaccine safety that discourage vaccination. We argue that addressing misconceptions requires awareness of the broader conceptual contexts in which they are embedded. Here, we developed a cognitive model of the intuitive theory surrounding vaccination decisions. Using this model, we were able to make accurate predictions about how people’s beliefs would be revised in light of educational interventions, design an effective new intervention encouraging vaccination, and understand how these beliefs were affected by real-world events. This approach provides the foundation for richer understandings of intuitive theories and belief revision more broadly.

Green infrastructure serves as a critical no-regret strategy to address climate change mitigation and adaptation in climate action plans. Climate justice refers to the distribution of climate change-induced environmental hazards (e.g., increased frequency and intensity of floods) among socially vulnerable groups. Yet no index has addressed both climate justice and green infrastructure planning jointly in the USA. This paper proposes a spatial climate justice and green infrastructure assessment framework to understand social-ecological vulnerability under the impacts of climate change. The Climate Justice Index ranks places based on their exposure to climate change-induced flooding, and water contamination aggravated by floods, through hydrological modelling, GIS spatial analysis and statistical methodologies. The Green Infrastructure Index ranks access to biophysical adaptive capacity for climate change. A case study for the Huron River watershed in Michigan, USA, illustrates that climate justice hotspots are concentrated in large cities; yet these communities have the least access to green infrastructure. This study demonstrates the value of using GIS to assess the spatial distribution of climate justice in green infrastructure planning and thereby to prioritize infrastructure investment while addressing equity in climate change adaptation.