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How forecasts expressing uncertainty are perceived by UK students
Author(s) -
Peachey Jodie Anne,
Schultz David M.,
Morss Rebecca,
Roebber Paul J.,
Wood Robert
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
weather
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.467
H-Index - 40
eISSN - 1477-8696
pISSN - 0043-1656
DOI - 10.1002/wea.2094
Subject(s) - atmospheric research , library science , sociology , meteorology , geography , computer science
A survey was conducted at the University of Manchester during autumn 2010. Participants filled out an anonymous survey during an untimed testing session. A total of 92 students participated: 62 second-year undergraduates in EART20170 Computing, Data Analysis and Communication Skills and 30 third-year undergraduates in EART30551 Meteorology (Schultz et al., 2012). These students were primarily in the earthand environmental-science programmes, but had little prior academic experience with meteorology. As the results from the two groups were similar, they were combined into one dataset. The survey questions were drawn from previously published studies in the USA by Morss et al. (2008, 2010), Joslyn et al. (2009), and Joslyn and Savelli (2010), with minor modifications (e.g. to adapt the questions to Celsius instead of Fahrenheit, and improvements in wording). Because the questions had been used previously, they were not pre-tested within the UK. The surveys presented participants with a series of human-behaviour questions designed to test four themes: