Assessing teachers’ conceptual framework for understanding climate literacy principles

Background/Question/Methods

The need to deepen teachers’ knowledge and understanding of the science of climate change is crucial given the ever-mounting evidence that global climate change will impact so many aspects of our environment.  Unfortunately, most of the education research on climate literacy has focused on attitudes about climate change with very few measuring teachers’ actual content knowledge.  Without a solid understanding of the scientific underpinnings of climate change, teachers will be ill-prepared to accurately convey this critical knowledge base to their students.  This study used the principles defined in NOAA’s “Climate Literacy: The Essential Principles of Climate Sciences” to guide both the content of a week-long professional development workshop and as the framework for assessing the nature of teachers’ understanding of climate change science.  At the conclusion of the one-week workshop, teachers created detailed concept maps of their understanding of climate change science.  The propositions illustrated in each concept map were later categorized by content and assigned to one of the seven Essential Principles accordingly.  Each proposition was then analyzed using a relational scoring method to measure the depth and breadth of the teachers’ understanding or misunderstanding of the scientific content material and key conceptual relationships.

Results/Conclusions

Results indicate that teachers understand the effects side of climate change quite a bit more than the causal side, in particular the potential effects on flora, fauna, ecosystems, and on human lives.  Conversely, it appears that the causes and complex interactions that affect climate, and subsequently other earth systems, are not fully understood by these teachers.  Specifically, an understanding of scientific method, both the analysis of empirical evidence and predictive modeling, appears to be either not part of teacher awareness and/or comes with misconceptions and misunderstandings.  Several key causal links and interactions of earth systems that affect climate appear to be under-emphasized by these teachers and/or misunderstood to a large extent.  These findings will help support the overall goal of this project, which is to ultimately develop better curricular material and delivery tactics that can help correct the relative lack of awareness and understanding of these key climate science concepts.