Caroline Ignell

Caroline Ignell serves as a Senior Lecturer at Stockholm University's Department of Education, where she focuses on upper secondary education with particular emphasis on geography, social studies, and economics. Her academic work bridges educational theory and practical applications in environmental education.

Her primary research interests include:

• Upper secondary students' learning processes and conceptual change
• Epistemological beliefs regarding scientific knowledge
• Pro-environmental values and norms formation
• Students' understanding of economic aspects of global environmental problems
• Relationships between pricing mechanisms and social costs of climate change

Dr. Ignell is actively involved in two major research groups: the Conceptual Change group, which examines how students revise and reconstruct prior knowledge when encountering new concepts; and the Educational Research in Citizenship Competences (ERiCC) group, which investigates how knowledge, skills, attitudes and values are mobilized for democratic participation in pluralistic societies.

She currently leads the research project 'Climate change - developing social science teaching for advancing knowledge, action and hope,' which aims to transform civics education around climate change by emphasizing solutions and fostering agency among young people. Her work demonstrates how educational approaches can help students develop nuanced understandings of complex environmental-economic relationships while cultivating hope and engagement.

Dr. Ignell's research has established important insights about how students conceptualize environmental impacts in relation to pricing mechanisms, revealing both limitations in current understanding and opportunities for educational intervention. Her longitudinal studies track how students' values and beliefs about climate change solutions evolve during their upper secondary education.