Teaching Climate for Understanding: Integrating Pedagogy, Modeling Tools, and Visual Interpretation

Abstract

This dissertation includes three different projects that focus on increasing climate literacy in a formal education setting through classroom intervention. The first study utilizes a pre- and post-design to assess the course outcomes of an active learning centric and data driven weather and climate course for nonscience majors. Specifically, this study seeks to understand how formal academic intervention can impact undergraduates' climate and meteorology knowledge as well as their belief in and risk perceptions towards climate-related hazards. Study two utilizes a mixed methods approach, analyzing pre- and post-questionnaires, student submissions, and concept maps to investigate the learning outcomes from a two-part inquiry driven lab utilizing an educational climate modeling web tool with non-science major undergraduates. The final study utilizes eye-tracking technology to investigate how people with varying levels of climate-specific expertise read academic papers and integrate the figures within these papers into their overall understanding of the papers. The combination of these studies through this dissertation investigates effective teaching methods for climate and meteorology and highlights the impact of intervention on student understanding of climate science.