TikTok as Learning Analytics Data: Framing Climate Change and Data Practices

Climate change has far-reaching impacts on communities around the world. However, climate change education has more often focused on scientific facts and statistics at a global scale than experiences at personal and local scales. To understand how to frame climate change education, I turn to youth-created videos on TikTok—a video-sharing, social media platform. Semantic network analysis of hashtags related to climate change reveals multifaceted, intertwining discourse around awareness of climate change consequences, call for action to reduce human impacts on natural systems, and environmental activism. I further explore how youth integrate personal, lived experiences data into climate change discussions. A higher usage of second-person perspective ("you"; i.e., addressing the audience), prosocial and agency words, and negative messaging tone are associated with higher odds of a video integrating lived experiences. These findings illustrate the platform’s affordances: In communicating to a broad audience, youth take on agency and pro-social stances and express emotions to relate to viewers and situate their content. Findings suggest the utility of learning analytics to explore youth’s perspectives and provide insights to frame climate change education in ways that elevate lived experiences.