An Exploratory, Preliminary Report on United States Weather Education Trends and General Population Links Between Weather Salience and Systemizing

Abstract

Meteorologists have been interested in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education endeavors for many years. The present study’s authors recently observed an apparent trend in United States public schools away from weather content in physical science classes, especially at higher grade levels. Through the blending of multiple psychological theories, this study sought to examine when people in the United States are presented with educational weather content at the Kindergarten to Grade 12 (K-12) levels and also investigated links between two psychological constructs: Weather salience and systemizing. Recent evidence among people on the autism spectrum suggests that weather salience—psychological attention to weather—is linked to systemizing, a psychological process that involves attention-to-detail and pattern recognition, thus prompting an investigation of this relationship in the general population. Results preliminarily suggest that K-12 weather education in the United States occurs most often in the elementary and middle school years, but that people receiving weather education only in high school, and intriguingly a combination of elementary and high school, but not middle school, have the highest weather salience levels. There was also a positive relationship between weather salience and systemizing. Results are discussed in light of the weather salience, systemizing, and social cognitive career theories.